Nokia, the largest handset manufacturer in the world (accounting for approximately 40% of the market) purchased their largest software platform Symbian - at least the remaining 49% it didn’t already own. It immediately relaunched the platform as an “open source” initiative under the Eclipse-style license.

While this is not a totally free licensing scheme on par with GPL, it’s certainly as open as a certain member of the competition. What’s interesting to me is that pundits tend to assume that this is Nokia directing their efforts against Android, a Google-led initiative for an open source mobile platform. While they seem like more comparable products, I really believe this is Nokia securing themselves against Apple and RIM - this is their method of battening down the hatches for the impending mobile platform wars.

Symbian is the dominant mobile platform and has been for a long time. What I suspect Nokia is hoping to accomplish is to outmaneuver Apple, RIM and the increasingly irrelevant Palm in terms of feature deployment and developer satisfaction.

As important as it is to satisfy consumers with a high-quality product it’s arguably more important to be an attractive platform for developers to deploy on. The big cloud of third-party software vendors is going to be dramatically more clever than you can ever be at making software for your app. This is, again and again, something that mobile platforms learn as readily as PC operating systems. Palm won the PDA battles by being easier to develop applications. Apple manuevered itself into a competitive space by capturing the piles of free software by switching to a BSD core and their strategy with the iPhone indicates they’re going to have to learn that lesson all over again.

Similar open source projects rarely compete with each other because the development community that’s attracted to one or the other are markedly different and steer the character of the platform in a particular direction. Look at the differences between KDE and Gnome, to suggest they compete because they fulfill the same purpose is to miss the point of serving different audiences with different preferences.

The key difference here is that hardware drives the mobile-market at the moment because there’s enough differentiating factors for certain devices to self-select for certain markets.

This is Nokia securing itself in the future market, not necessarily attempting to shut-down competition, especially from another open source project. I would imagine the only reason Nokia didn’t join Android project is that its handset provider roster made up of Nokia’s major competition -Samsung, Motorola and LG particularly.

Nokia has decided to keep its own pie rather than fight for a slice of the one it helps grow. Given their current share of the market, this is rational.

Who benefits the most from this struggle between Apple’s iPhone, Google’s Android, RIM Blackberry and now Nokia’s Symbian ? Microsoft, naturally.

While Microsoft does have its own mobile platform Windows Mobile is, in-effect, a convenient barrier-to-exit for Windows users more than a full-blown initiative. I own a WinMo phone, and while I use it as an independent device from any PC, it’s very clear it wasn’t designed to do this. These other platforms, however, are about making the handset a stand-alone device rather than a satellite screen.

Silverlight and Live Mesh offer opportunities to integrate readily with these platforms in ways that promote the Vista, Office and Windows Server cash-cows.

What can Nokia do to put itself in a position current un-beatable by any competitor? Provide support for the N-Gage APIs in this new open source initiative. A high-quality gaming API running on any device capable of Symbian would hit a niche nobody else is in.

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Get it? Because red shift means it’s moving away and blue shift -…moving on.

The media has had their take, such as it is, on Dion cum Liberal Party’s submission of a Carbon Tax - dubbed The Green Shift. The variety and veracity of the opinions they publish is astounding - mainly the angry, ignorant semi-bigotry newspapers strut about as if it’s the voice of Canada. I suppose it’s an easier way to dodge things like factual rigor since they don’t need to do all that annoying work like, examining information or understanding complex problems.

I had stopped turning to newspapers for a rational, informed response to world events years ago and The Globe & Mail, National Post et al. have done little to convince me this wasn’t the right decision.

I, despite my misgivings regarding Dion’s leadership, support the Carbon Tax credit in both form and principle. I think, however, there’s some profound misunderstanding of what it all means, how it works and what’s making the Tories so edgy that they’ll send fomenting pack-dog hacks to write letters-to-Ed nationwide.

Most of the opposition to the Carbon Tax premise most of their argument on the two tried-and-true pillars of political sympathy “it’ll hurt the economy” and “it’ll hurt the poor” - I’ll note the rather disgusting notion of separating the two, but this is their logic not mine.

They suggest the Carbon Tax will hurt the economy by making it too damned expensive for our manufacturing and farming sectors to do their work and compete with the unlegislated American producers. Our farmers will then of course have no choice but to shut down and line up at the welfare office, so the logic goes and then we’ll all be out of maple syrup and buffalo.

The same basic story holds true for the manufacturing sector - in this case since most of the big (read automobile) manufacturers in Canada are American companies, these companies won’t want to pay the taxes and will move their factories elsewhere.

Sounds sensical right?

Protecting our farmers has been a serious misstep in Canadian economic history for quite some time. While I sympathize with our yeomen, market realities are what they are and the Carbon Tax does not make or break Canadian farmers; Canadians not buying Canadian farm-goods is breaking the Canadian farmer and they aren’t doing that already. Frankly, I’m tired of my (and your) tax dollars being spent maintaining their polluting machinery so they can continue to under-perform at the grocery store. So it’s a matter of democracy here - a majority of Canadians are not farmers and I don’t think appreciate giving them special treatment over anyone else having a tough time getting paid to work.

Our manufacturing sector is hardly in danger if it opts into less polluting technology which will do two things - make Canada a leader in Green manufacturing and put money into OUR research and development community to spur more efficient manufacturing methods. It’s really expensive to shut-down a unionized plant and set-up a new one and GM is strapped for cash. Toyota is devoted to developing green methods and with the incentives to do so as the Green Shift outlines, it’ll encourage expansion, not reduction of capacity.

Here’s how it’ll play out for GM, Magna etc. They’ve gotta pay this tax, $40 a tonne after four years (adjusted for inflation). So in order for them to shut down the plant this tax has to be greater than the total cost of shutting down the plant (severance pay etc.), building a new one elsewhere and staffing it up, at worst. They could, alternatively, invest in better manufacturing practices to reduce the tax year-over-year and sell this technology to other companies and potentially turn a profit. What would you do if you were GM?

What about the poor? The poor often get trotted out by Conservatives to prove this point or that and then are unceremoniously crammed back in their box when they need to launch policy. In this case many critics suggest that the Carbon Tax will adversely affect the poor.

This just doesn’t pan out - the tax is based on usage is thus progressive. The richer you are the proportionally more carbon you consume - through your SUV, jet-setting, wastefully manufactured goods, etc. While poor people still produce carbon, they do so at a fraction the quantity of the rich (around 25 - 30% the amount).

If one does as The Green Shift suggests and use this policy to shift the revenue from the tax back to the poor you’ve created a virtuous cycle.

The economic argument criticizing the Carbon Tax is arguably the weakest - an economists first resort would be exactly this policy. You tax things that are bad - like pollution, not things that are good - like income; so this is better than some of the things we take for granted (income and property tax).

The danger, some argue, lies in the fact that the Liberals would now have this big chunk of change to squander as they’ve done in the past. (when was the last time a government was hailed as “fiscally prudent” even by their detractors?) Since the plan outlines expenditure as well as collection this is less of a concern, there’s a direct A-to-B correspondence between how the money is gained and spent.

A big issue some of the clever armchair economists argue is the value of our goods in the international market, particularly in combination against our high dollar. The problem with this assertion is it makes the un-motivated assumption that our carbon emission will be static for two reasons. Firstly, no innovation will take place, while this creates a tidy economic model it’s just not the case - especially in Canada. Secondly, the carbon-tax will fail to depress oil consumption because nobody slows down and nobody innovates. The carbon-tax will spur exactly these two activities - that’s what these kinds of taxes do.

Further, our largest trading partner, the United States has both presumptive leaders pledging to put a price on carbon - thus, we might face tariff barriers from the and the EU if we don’t implement Carbon Tax.

The biggest plus for the carbon-tax is the price stability of fuels. Economies aren’t hurt by high-prices they’re hurt by price instability. Carbon-taxes, versus say a cap-and-trade, introduce greater price stability which is probably the best thing for the economy when it comes to fuel.

My issue, perhaps in my rabid cut-throat economic-environmentalism, is that the Carbon Tax doesn’t go far enough. Primarily because it targets exclusively carbon. There are plenty of other emissions just as harmful to our environment which are much more closely associated with our Big Polluters (the 70 worst polluters in Canada). Thankfully, a standard already exists to convert those emissions into equivalent tonnes of carbon, making the application of the tax to them pretty straightforward. This conversion is called the Global Warming Potential (with CO2 being, by definition, 1).

Further is the tacit assumption that the tax will, in four years, bring our carbon emissions to 375 million tonnes - some estimates put our output at twice that level in business-as-usual models.

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I outlined earlier the inherent difference between the web now and the web to be. That is, the difference between Web 2.0 and Web 3.0. A big question that comes out of that description is how will current use of technology change to allow for this Web 3.0 to emerge?

I argued that Web 2.0 and 3.0 aren’t defined by their technology per se. They’re defined by their usage scenarios which imply, but don’t necessitate, innovation in software. Web 2.0 didn’t do anything new it just did it with new people in a new space. JavaScript has been around for as long as Netscape, XML was created by a 161 people a decade ago. Web 2.0 introduced the notion that everything you do on a computer could be done with a browser and that the web could become as valid a medium for communication as any other - including real-space.

Web 3.0 extends that, it pushes the boundary and posits that not only is the Web as good as anything else, it may, in fact, be better for a tonne of things. As our democratic ideals start catching up to technology we want to develop systems whereby everyone can have a meaningful contribution, where discussion really is discussion and not a room full of murmuring, or an epistemic oligarchy. Through the web, we can enable what is intractable in reality - the promulgation of the ideas, thoughts and discourse of hundreds of thousands, millions or even billions of people in a meaningful way.

The key distinction between the web now versus the web 3.0 is that word ‘meaningful’. The web already integrates everybody with everybody else to some degree, but it makes it a devil of a task to discover content, people and ideas that are meaningful and relevant - especially for humans.

Enter the semantic web. The semantic web, as the name implies, will provide a mechanism for machines to have a facilitated comprehension of meaning - to aid us in discovering new ideas, people and content by the association of meaning rather than hypertext references.

Web 1.0 and even 2.0 has a single-dimensional association between content (web pages/sites), this association is the hyperlink. The context of where the hyperlink appears on a page let’s a human reader know what that association actually means - a machine cannot understand that, and even if it could it can’t expand upon that through entailment. The semantic web allows an unlimited dimensionality of associations between content - even ones that are emergent rather than ascribed.

How will this look? What kinds of tools and purposes will we have for this kind of association? We see some fledging attempts at semantic assocation by way of “tagging”. Tagging works best as a controlled vocabulary - that is for any given subject attribute, there is one and only one word to describe it. Tags tend to break down as semantic data because people want to be comprehensive in their tagging and thus enter semantically redundant tags. Tagging is a step below controlled vocabulary which is arguably the least semantic of the semantic methods of content organization.

The next tier of semantic technology, which provides more information as to the meaning of content is a taxonomy. We’re all familiar with taxonomies even if the term isn’t. The traditional way of categorizing the animal kingdom is a taxonomy (Domain, Kingdom, Phylum, Class etc.), the Dewey Decimal Classification and Library of Congress Classification systems are taxonomies. These provide once described to a machine, a certain kind of semantic understanding - that of generality and abstraction. What is true of a parent element must also be true of its children, e.g. “What’s true of mammals is also true of apes.” This is significantly richer than the rattle-bag of attributes that tagging introduces but it’s most constrictive - typically an entity can only be in one place on a taxonomy and what if the taxonomy isn’t fully understood?

The third semantic system available combines aspects of tagging and taxonomy - only in this case it’s the tags that exist within the taxonomy rather than the entities, and that is the thesaurus. Thesauri allow machines to understand equivalance in tags, homographic relationships while still having the hierarchy and classification inherent to taxonomies.

The fourth and final system is the ontology. The ontology takes the basic framework of the thesaurus and applies logical rules to it. Whereas the thesaurus has no notion of mutual exclusion or entailment; this is something the ontology enculcates. In a biological ontology one need only specify an ape is a mammal rather than it is both a mammal and warm-blooded, because the ontology understands that although these are different things, one entails the other - it would also understand its impossible for an ape to be cold blooded.

I’ve described these systems in deliberately abstract terms because the actual applications are impossible to foresee - however I envision our migration to the semantic web essentially climbing these steps of increasing semantic robustness. Each step gets further and further away from the kind of usage scenarios in which we typically engage with existing technology.

I don’t believe we’ll all hop-in head-first into developing personal ontologies and deploying ontological tools, just as we haven’t gone head-first into the social networking tools. The pace is lightning fast but not instantaneous.

As users become accustomed to the workflow inherent to each one and automation tasks make them almost redundant we’ll see a steady progression.

The technology underpinning all of them, RDF, much like XHTML for the remainder of the web, is robust and simple enough to maintain viability throughout - the more advanced technology GRDDL and OWL in partciular, I predict won’t see adoption until we start moving up the semantic system ladder.

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I think I’ve bemoaned University of Toronto’s pathetic open initiatives, they are either dead-in-the-water or, in this case, completely subversive of their intent.

ELPub, the conference hosted here at the University of Toronto is no exception to the line of seriously out-of-touch intitiatives. The theme is Open Scholarship, which I would ASSUME has to do with increasing the accessibility of academic materials and research and broadening the abilities of all researchers and potential students to get involved in the academic process. This would entail reducing the biggest barrier to entry - resource capability - that is money.

Money, more than any single factor is the barrier to involvement. Academics is, by all other measures, fairly inclusive and non-discriminatory (compared to other arenas like say software development) so where in their minds did they believe setting a $160 price tag as the cheapest ticket ($250 at the door) for students make sense? Especially given the topic at hand.

I’m pretty well off financially by Canadian domestic college student standards and I simply cannot justify that expense. I won’t try to speak for the many other students who are struggling with comparatively mountainous debt and meagre earning potential but I’m sure they don’t appreciate this.

It’s this kind of out-of-touch silliness that grates on me as a UofT student. So many organizations on campus are vacuous wind-bags that attempt (futily) to get attention on “the issues” without remembering to lead by example and to first and foremost be principled and cooperative, I’m looking at you ASSU.

Open means open. I understand you need to a) pay the bills and b) discourage wing-nuts who want to loaf around the conference c) keep the attendance count manageable but $160 is absurd. $50 is probably more along the right lines and even then there should be an optional subsidy process for applicants.

You want open, open your conference - otherwise it isn’t any better than the semi-mythical ivory-tower academics who lounge in their leather armchairs pontificating about the suffering of the masses, or the post-modern version; of the khaki-clad MacBook totting “activist” with his $40 American Apparel hoodie, $120 Converse Chuck Ts screaming at pedestrians about oppression.

Everything now, coming out of the event is tinged with disingenuousness and that, with conferences like this, is worse than failure.

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Often when I attend open source conventions or meet with people who consider themselves open source enthusiasts I am confronted with the most startling hypocrisy that I’m often at a loss as to how to respond. When attempting to list the "enemies of open source" the first company to roll of the tongue is of course, Microsoft - it shouldn’t be. The standard bearer, the very paragon of proprietary control and vicious lawyering of innovative hackers is none other than the little fruit-named company at Infinity Loop, Cupertino.

Invariably I’ll see a talk or a lecture on the lack of cooperation from hardware vendors with open source organizations and in the crowd I’ll see all those little backlit apples floating around. Does nobody find this ironic?

How about the iPhone? Apple fully intends on retaining vice-like controls over the destiny of the device - even after the consumer has purchased it outright and owns the bloody thing. Apple has become so cowed by the major carriers that it’s disallowing independent purchasing - forcing customers to do everything in store on the new 3G iPhones. This is nothing to say of the application architecture and distribution mechanism.

The iPod is the cracker for the iTunes cheese as far as Apple is concerned. The quantity of crippling DRM mechanisms and various other hoops to manage music I own is ludicrous. NEVER EVER should a digital version of a music file be less convenient than a physical media version - but this is exactly what occurs with the limited synch, proprietary media management software the iPod forces upon users.

Mac OS X - built on an open source operating system (FreeBSD for those of you not in the know) is hardly welcoming to open source development - XCode is a tool for developing apps for Apple to sell.

The strategy for MacOS reminds me of the market angling of Windows 98 - produce some headline titles everyone wants and backfill with shovel ware.

As someone who became very disillusioned with the company (around the coming of Mac OS X) it’s difficult for me to intuitively understand why everyone turned toward Apple for precisely the reasons I began to loathe their product line. They stopped caring about their MacAddicts and instead strut themselves for the general public and by "they" I mean Steve Jobs. So, if this is the case, how can they maintain such a loyal fan-base, not necessarily the fomenting Berkenstock with socks wearing evanglists of yore, but a group of people who well overspend for an under-delivering set of products?

What I believe to be the secret to Apple’s success in recent years has nothing to do with its usability or reliability - both of which are drastically inferior to both Windows and Linux (respectively) in the long term. It has to do with two things - industrial design / fashion and the ascendancy of the Web as platform.

As the web has become the primary conduit for practically everything we do the individual details of the operating system you’re using locally becomes further commoditized. So for most users who send email, browse Amazon/eBay, hit-up Facebook, watch YouTube it just doesn’t matter what OS you’re using. There exists, I believe, a codependent relationship between Apple users and the web productivity applications coming out.

I’m hypothesizing that applications like Google Office, Twitter, or any app that replaces a typically desktop app with a web version - are going to have a disproportionate quantity of Apple users relative to the actual market.

I believe this to be because most people just don’t care about the long-term viability of their computer so things like "lifestyle association" - which Apple has spent many millions of dollars generating - make the balance. In some ways, Apple has become the computer for people who don’t really need/want one and feel obligated to buy SOMETHING.

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My friend and colleague David Eaves wrote a though provoking post on his perceptions of the open web as a social movement, you can read the entire thing at his website .

Earlier this year I did a fairly extensive study wherein I researched open source organizations as social entrepreneurial movements; a topic that is albeit worded slightly differently is more or less exactly about that which David was writing.

What’s interesting to me, is that David backs away from what is to me, the big questions surrounding the "open web"? What is it? What will it look like in the future? How is that different from the present? What aspects of the open web are NOT technological? That last question, is perhaps the most significant.

There is much discussion around the concept of open web but few people seem to know where it will lead. As a principle to be applied, what is the fallout? What is going to change? What are the consequences?

David observes rightly that the current troops in the open web movement are technologists - consequently that’s exactly the kind of problems they tackle. It is the non-technological problems that are perhaps the most pernicious and complex - and intransigent.

Other questions arise such as how to disentangle the open web movement from the open source movement writ large? What is and is not web related? This would seem a stupid question back in 1997 - but in these days of Web 2.0, with as Tim O’Reilly put it the Web as Operating System it becomes nearly impossible to cleanly partition web systems from local systems.

If the open web movement is a social movement - what are the social problems it’s going to solve? Explain to me my suffering at the hands of the copy right holders? I don’t feel like I’m suffering…do you?

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There exists a fundamentally false assumption in centrally resposited information sources - specifically those that are erected by a vast community of semi-anonymous users. That is, they assume there is one possible explanation or at least a best or “optimal” explanation for a thing. The biggest proponent of this fallacy is of course, Wikipedia. The essential premise that it is authoritative by way of democracy or worse compromise.

Democracy is a poor measure of determining truth. Appealing to the masses is intuitively convincing but demonstrably wrong - this is especially true when attempting to isolate entirely subjective metrics such as “quality”, “worth” “beauty” etc. Wikipedia exercises this fallacy on occasion to settle disputes - putting to vote reality. This is the primary critique levelled at Wikipedia, that everybody often isn’t as smart as somebody when it comes to a specific subject.

Curiously, where democracy is needed it missing. The kinds of things I read on Wikipedia are, at best, what the author(s) of the document thinks of prime relevance to the subject - there exists little avenue for the demands of information seekers to be addressed; information flow is manipulated entirely by the suppliers.

Often Wikipedia articles diminish their own definitiveness by conceding to angry (but wrong) users. To allow information that is demonstrably untrue simply because sufficient quantities of people believe it dilutes the value of the affected articles. Articles on wikipedia are not consensus reality, they are compromise reality - they are the explanation of things that trigger the least violent emotional reaction in their readership.

The truth, as presented by Wikipedia is that endorsed by those valiant enough to partake in the discussion page and article editing voodoo and none else. Think of what this means for simple language barriers - factual reality is impeded by the mundane block of differing languages.

If one seeks the consensus reality - as is typical for scholars, one must be as comprehensive as possible yet discriminating at the same time. To calculate the bias of information sources as precisely as possible, so it may be least understood if not compensated for when summarizing or deducing. How is this possible when but a single version - or version lineage is allowed for a given subject?

Contrast this with say, the blogosphere. People’s perceptions of the world, assertions and beliefs are far better understood if one to aggregate all relevant blog entries on a given subject than if one were to read the appropriate wikipedia entry. This is enabled because each blogger maintains their own artefact of perception - they record it without interference or oversight. This allows extreme bias to enter very quickly, but when analyzing opinion or perception eliminating bias is undesirable - accounting for it is the goal.

What is needed, then, is an intermediary between the highly structured wikipedia - with its rigorous oversight, stringent quality standards and logical navigation scheme and the highly networked, cohesive and comprehensive blogosphere.

We need information neighbourhoods, not information kibbutzes if we are to understand the emergent properties of collective intelligence. Every person’s schema must be simultaneously partitioned and cohered to attain a properly normalized consensus.

To that end, the semantic web provides an avenue.

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