Image via Wikipedia

Two separate pieces of news came my way during the night, and although both were written about elsewhere whilst those of us on this side of the Atlantic slept, they remain worthy of mention; both in their own right and because of the wider trend of which they are part.

First, Cloud Computing provider 3Tera announced their AppStore;

“the first marketplace for cloud components where enterprise users, software vendors and datacenter experts can exchange production-ready, scalable and highly available cloud components on a pay-per-use basis.”

You can listen to my recent podcast with 3Tera’s Bert Armijo, here.

Second, Semantic Technology pioneer AdaptiveBlue‘s CEO (and Semantic Web Gang regular) Alex Iskold sent an email to point me at their launch of a new Glue API;

“This new API taps into Glue’s databases and semantic recognition engine enabling fun & useful applications about people and things.”

Both companies recognise that there is a far greater pool of talent outside their employ than inside, and both are seeking to place themselves and their technology at the centre of a scalable ecosystem rather than perpetuating the old fashioned model of supplying solutions. Both recognise, too, that the ‘sticky’ destination site is becoming increasingly irrelevant to many of our online behaviours. We want and need functionality, community, reliability and more; but we want it on our terms, delivered in real time at the point of need.

By seeking to build and mediate a critical mass of third party applications, 3Tera is repeating a formula successfully demonstrated by the likes of Apple, Salesforce and others. Partners and developers deliver far more working code than 3Tera’s own developers could manage, and those partners are incentivised to bring their own customer base along with them. 3Tera benefits every time one of these partners makes a sale — for negligible effort on 3Tera’s part — and has an easy route to new customers of its own via its partners. In time, 3Tera’s own AppLogic may even come to increasingly be perceived as no more than an on-ramp to the AppStore’s riches.

AdaptiveBlue’s API extends Glue in an obvious direction, adding to site-independent strengths upon which I have remarked previously.

The world is changing. By embracing the power of networks (both technological and social) and putting others to work on your behalf, companies are increasingly able to punch far beyond their own weight. It is ever-more feasible for small, agile, responsive and engaged organisations to draw upon the resources of others to mutual benefit. As Newton once wrote,

“If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants.”

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Much has been written about growing Enterprise use of social media (usually Twitter, these days) to successfully track and mitigate customer complaint. Many have been quick to spot that the disproportionately high cost of satisfying (or, more cynically, silencing) these early adopters is unlikely to scale effectively as an increasingly large cohort of customers move onto these services, and it must remain an open question as to whether ComcastCares and its peers can survive any move to the mainstream in recognisable form.

It appears, though, that Enterprise engagement in the social sphere changes the game far more significantly than merely enabling a select few twitterati to jump the Customer Support queue, and that this change is worth effort and investment in order to ensure that it does scale. What’s actually happening is that a relationship is being enabled between a brand and what Seth Godin might recognise as its tribe; a relationship in which interactions are no longer driven predominantly by the desire to seek redress. Rather than only raising those issues serious enough for us to have written letters or endured telephone muzak in the past, we now comment on issues at the periphery of a brand. Collectively, we’ve moved from simply complaining about the worst failures of companies, their products and their employees, toward emitting an impressive stream of FYIs. Individually insignificant, and possibly unimportant, together these light touches on and around a brand build into an ever-changing and valuable commentary that brands and the corporations they front would do well to take notice of. The minor niggles about an otherwise exemplary service, the human touches that made us smile, the odd inconsistencies in a polished persona; none are enough to make us pick up the phone, but we comment upon them endlessly in Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed and elsewhere, and by tapping into this fundamentally honest stream of consciousness there is much for those about whom we comment to learn. Good companies probably already know about fundamental failings in a product long before their customer support operation melts down under the weight of complaints or their quarterly sales targets are seriously under-achieved. Do they have as good a handle on the things we love? Do they have a clue about the minor gripes of customers outside their pre-launch polling groups? Do they know about the gut reaction to a colour, a touch, a smell, or a careless word that persuaded a likely prospect to buy a technically or aesthetically inferior product from the competition instead? All this and more is there for the taking in the stream of online chatter freely directed their way.

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I will be taking a bigger step in 2009, when I move from full time employment with Talis to see what else I am capable of as an independent consultant.

A lot has happened since 2005. I joined a provider of software to UK libraries that had aspirations to be something bigger, and played my part in the team that made sure we got there. Operating entirely on money the company earned through its existing product lines, with no debt and no external investors, we set about refreshing those existing products and challenging many of the sector’s long-held presumptions about engagement, participation, openness, innovation, and control. From Library 2.0 to Open Data, we were visible on a global stage, we were active, and with white papers, public speaking, blogging, podcasting, facilitation, cajoling, challenging and networking Talis played a significant part in shaping perceptions that are now widely viewed as norms.

The company had bigger fish to fry, though, having embarked upon an ambitious development programme to deliver a technology Platform upon which the next generation of Semantic Web applications could be built. Talis set about assembling the talent required to build that Platform, and I set about building brand recognition in markets and territories where Talis was previously unknown.

In November last year, Richard MacManus of ReadWriteWeb listed Talis as one of 10 Semantic Apps to Watch;

“Talis is a 40-year old UK software company which has created a semantic web application platform. They are a bit different from the other 9 companies profiled here, as Talis has released a platform and not a single product. The Talis platform is kind of a mix between Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web, in that it enables developers to create apps that allow for sharing, remixing and re-using data. Talis believes that Open Data is a crucial component of the Web, yet there is also a need to license data in order to ensure its openness. Talis has developed its own content license, called the Talis Community License, and recently they funded some legal work around the Open Data Commons License.

According to Dr Paul Miller, Technology Evangelist at Talis, the company’s platform emphasizes ‘the importance of context, role, intention and attention in meaningfully tracking behaviour across the web.’”
(my links)

Last month, he revisited the ten and concluded;

“Over the past year, Talis has continued to make a name for itself as an evangelist for the Semantic Web, most notably through the blogging and podcasting [1, 2] activities of Paul Miller. Talis also produces a great magazine for Semantic Web, called Nodalities, and has an active company blog under the same name. As for the company’s products, the platform seems to be iterating nicely and is being used in niche library and government applications.

RWW verdict one year later: Talis has successfully positioned itself as an authority on Semantic Web in the blogosphere, which we love because it’s a great way to keep track of Semantic Web trends!”
(my links)

Through our blogs, our podcasts, our magazine, our presentations and our support for the community, Talis has played a key role in raising awareness and credibility for the Semantic Web as something more than an academic exercise. Talis, and others, have set about demonstrating that it offers a viable set of technologies that reach to the heart of business processes in a wide range of areas. Through activities such as the monthly Semantic Web Gang and ZDNet’s Semantic Web blog, I have played my part in bringing together some of the key players and giving them a Platform on which to share their ideas and experiences.

We have been concerned with more than just technology, though, and have devoted as much time to understanding and illustrating the economic, strategic and organisational disruptions that face businesses now and moving forward. Our early and ongoing support for the Open Data cause is a case in point, underpinning our shared belief that value is shifting at many points throughout the enterprise; previously hoarded data is no less valuable than it was, necessarily, but the opportunities to benefit when the value proposition is reconsidered from the perspective of the open Web are enormous.

I have played a significant part in all of this, and have learned much from the differing perspectives, backgrounds and experiences of my colleagues inside Talis… and all of the people I’ve met outside the company.

As Talis moves into 2009, ready to focus far more on showing how its products and solutions will solve customers’ problems, the time has come for me to look for new challenges. I’ve been careful not to gratuitously push Talis products over the years, and I believe that I have been successful in explaining complex issues in an accessible fashion along the way. I hope that I have demonstrated neutrality, authority, and perspective, even whilst in the full time employ of a single company. There’s a lot to build upon there, and a real opportunity to extend that reach even further. So I’m going to be setting out on my own and taking on work with clients that can benefit from that track record. Analysis, consulting, advice, speaking engagements and more.

I’ve started talking to a lot of people recently, and am already noticing some very interesting prospects which I will be firming up now that this news has entered the public domain. I’m always open to additional offers, of course!

And the first customer for the newly independent me? Talis. My current employer will be contracting part of my time to continue working on some of the broader external activities I was already doing for them. The Semantic Web Gang, for example, will continue to be underwritten by Talis, and I remain its host.

So interesting times lie ahead. I’m excited by the opportunity and daunted by the challenge in almost equal parts. I look forward to seeing where this leads next, and I am sure that I shall see many of you along the way.

Paul.

“Now that is actually different than what many Cloud aficionados are doing. They, I would argue, are still focusing on how infrastructure and software will be the difference in the Cloud. I don’t feel that way. The real difference that the cloud will bring about will be in how people interact with the services they care about.”

Using his admiration for the iPhone as the hook (yes, I like mine too), Daryl goes on to argue that;

“Make no mistake. The cloud is about services – not about infrastructure or software. And, what people do with those services will be the most telling bits of reality surrounding this emerging phenomenon called Cloud computing.”

The infrastructure and the software are, of course, vitally important components in realising the Cloud’s potential, but Daryl clearly has a point when he reminds us that we’re all doing this for a reason. A significant proportion of those getting excited about the Cloud today are ‘just’ getting excited about the technology. They’re getting excited about speed, and size, and APIs, and technological disruption.

I’m certainly interested in the technology, but I get excited by the things that become possible when it is put to work; when large sets of resources are put in the hands of a large and interconnected network of people.

That’s why I see so much opportunity in the convergence between the technological, social, economic and strategic threads so loosely labelled ‘Web 2.0,’ ‘Cloud Computing,’ ‘Semantic Web,’ and ‘Linked Data.’ Alone, each is technically interesting (and, possibly, even exciting.) Together, they move us to a whole different level. And that is what this site will increasingly be about.

It sounds as if Daryl may share at least some of those sentiments, and I look forward to the journey.

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Wired Magazine

The concept of freemium has gained widespread acceptance amongst consumer-facing Web 2.0 companies, enabled by the low incremental cost of adding each new user. In an online and near-global market, a freemium approach to acquiring users can be a powerful and cost effective adjunct to more traditional sales and marketing processes. Anderson has discussed this topic before, notably in an article for Wired, and it will no doubt figure in his next book.

Wikipedia defines freemium simply, as;

“a business model which works by offering basic services for free, while charging a premium for advanced or special features. The word freemium is a portmanteau created by combining the two aspects of the business model: free and premium. The business model has gained popularity with Web 2.0 companies.”

In a useful ‘Taxonomy of Free’ in his Wired article, Anderson wrote;

“This term, coined by venture capitalist Fred Wilson, is the basis of the subscription model of media and is one of the most common Web business models. It can take a range of forms: varying tiers of content, from free to expensive, or a premium ‘pro’ version of some site or software with more features than the free version (think Flickr and the $25-a-year Flickr Pro).

Again, this sounds familiar. Isn’t it just the free sample model found everywhere from perfume counters to street corners? Yes, but with a pretty significant twist. The traditional free sample is the promotional candy bar handout or the diapers mailed to a new mother. Since these samples have real costs, the manufacturer gives away only a tiny quantity — hoping to hook consumers and stimulate demand for many more.

But for digital products, this ratio of free to paid is reversed. A typical online site follows the 1 Percent Rule — 1 percent of users support all the rest. In the freemium model, that means for every user who pays for the premium version of the site, 99 others get the basic free version. The reason this works is that the cost of serving the 99 percent is close enough to zero to call it nothing.”

Returning to his blog post, Anderson outlines four broad approaches that he feels best apply to this particular company’s situation;

1. Time limited (30 days free, then pay. This is the Salesforce model)
2. Feature limited (basic version free, more sophisticated version paid. This is the WordPress model)
3. Seat limited (can be used by up to some number of people for free, but more than that is paid. This is the Intuit QuickBooks model)
4. Customer type limited (small and young companies get it free, bigger and older companies pay. This is the model used by Microsoft’s BizSpark, where companies less than 3 years old and under $1 million in revenues get Microsoft’s business software free.)

Of these, he suggests a preference for 3 and 4, explaining that;

“They allow you to reach the largest potential market with the most useful product, and then convert the ones that are likely to be the best, most committed customers.”

For those used to the practices of consumer-facing companies such as Flickr, WordPress and others, Anderson’s recommendations may appear strange, but objectives, costs and opportunities are quite different when enticing business customers and his thinking reflects this. Commenting on the post, Ben Watson offers further useful insight from the perspective of a business user.

As an individual, I bring very different motivations to testing a new application than I might when fulfilling some corporate role. I am more inclined to play, and expending personal time playing with various possible solutions may well be perceived as ‘cheaper’ than buying in to a market leader. As an individual, too, I am often well placed to anticipate my own changing needs, and to compare those with premium features that purchasing a product would unlock. My free usage of the site is unlikely to be at volumes sufficient to incur significant cost for the provider, and may be largely offset by advertising revenue and any consumer evangelism in which I might indulge.

In the workplace, on the other hand, new products are often evaluated by putting them to work on a particular – real – task. Any trial has to be conducted with a product that is as close to the real thing as possible, and has to run for long enough to see the task through to completion; will the product do the job? Does it have training or support implications? In that context, the time- and feature-limited options that Anderson rejects are unlikely to entice the majority of prospective customers.

For the company seeking to apply freemium models in attracting business customers, though, the up-front costs are likely to be high. Trials may involve significant quantities of data and heavy use. More expensively, there may well be an expectation of (or requirement for) support in testing and integrating the product, and cautious businesses will doubtless look for something approaching an SLA before letting information onto distant servers over which they have no control.

Freemium can work in business as well as in the consumer space, but the calculations for viability will be very different and it’s unlikely to offset traditional marketing spend in quite the same way. Dan Farber noted the proportion of Salesforce revenue devoted to sales and marketing back in 2007, for example, writing;

“[Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff] addressed his company’s quest to reach a billion dollars in revenue and why he spends more than half of salesforce.com’s revenue, which was about $500 million for the year ending January 31, 2007, on sales and marketing. He responded … that a significant investment in worldwide marketing and distribution is required to meet demand.

…

In part, the big spend on sales and marketing is a remnant of his heritage, growing up professionally in Oracle with Larry Ellison. He apparently believes that to take on Oracle, SAP and Microsoft, you have to have a differentiated solution with clear benefits–in this case a pioneering on demand application and platform–and to spend on marketing and sales like his much bigger rivals. And we thought on demand software and Web 2.0 was more about self-service and word of mouth marketing–not if you want to go through  the front door of the Fortune 1000.”
(my emphasis)

What proportion of business customers need to pay in order to support those who are getting something for nothing? Is it even close to the 1% rule Anderson proposes in the consumer space? 

See also this video of Chris Anderson speaking at Nokia World last year.

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Recent advances in the business of Cloud Computing form just such a picture, and reach out to encompass previously unrelated aspects of Web 2.0, the Semantic Web, Platform Computing, Software as a Service (SaaS) and the economics of Disruption. Not merely some game of buzzword bingo on an unprecedented scale, it is becoming increasingly easy to see the opportunities for a significant shift in the way that we access computational resources; and to recognise that the walls separating organisations from their peers, their partners, their competitors and their customers will become ever-more permeable to the flow of data upon which those distant machines will compute.

There is much to understand that is already known in related fields, and much to discover that only becomes possible in this space. One early challenge is in carving a discrete niche for the place toward which we are moving with such rapidity. Far more than ‘just’ the Cloud; an evolution on from the playful flippancy that diminishes so many of Web 2.0′s poster children; and difficult to relate to the mainstream misconceptions of the Semantic Web’s complexity. Yet this new place is the sum of these parts, and far greater than they can ever be alone. So do we extend the already ephemeral notion of Cloud Computing? Do we appropriate the ‘next big thing’ label of Web 3.0? Or do we need a healthily fresh attitude to business computing’s apparently insatiable desire to apply labels?

First, though, let us consider the shape of this thing that is taking on more substance with each passing day.

Reporting on last week’s Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, CNET’s Dan Farber notes that

“The cloud was omnipresent,”

before going on to close his report with;

“cloud computing won’t be very compelling without what is variously called Web 3.0 or the Semantic Web.”

Indeed.

For too long, the emphasis in Cloud Computing circles has been almost exclusively upon provision of rapidly scalable and ad hoc remote computing on top of cost-effective commodity hardware. The Cloud play from Salesforce, Amazon’s EC2 and the rest has been dominated by the implicit assumption that these Cloud-based resources are an extension of the corporate data centre; a way to simply reduce the costs of enterprise computing.

There is value in this business, but there are bigger opportunities.

Nick Carr is amongst those to fear that a small number of players may come to dominate the provision of Cloud resources. He outlines many of these arguments in his latest book, The Big Switch, and more recently has been involved in an interesting discussion with Tim O’Reilly on the topic. Justin Leavesley shares some of Talis‘ views on the economics behind all this over on Nodalities, broadly agreeing with Tim O’Reilly;

“It’s pretty clear that utility cloud computing is highly capital intensive so it should come as no surprise that there are powerful economies of scale to be had. But the bottom line is that you are talking about plant and power. These are rival goods, scarce resources that are created and consumed. This is not different from many utility industries with one exception: the distribution network has global reach, already exists and is very cheap compared to existing utility distribution networks. It is a lot cheaper to access a computing resource on the other side of the planet than it is to send electricity or gas across the globe… [So] what is to stop economies of scale turning this into a global natural monopoly?

Actually, unless there are some large network effects, quite a lot stops single companies ruling entire industries. For a start, without network effects, economies of scale tend to run out: the curve is usually U-shaped. Telecoms, Gas, rail companies have strong network effects from their infrastructure-it makes little sense to have duplicate rail networks or gas networks in a country. Utility computing does not have this advantage because the distribution network is not owned by them.”

Continuing the conversation, Carr captures the usual widely held perception of Cloud Computing nicely;

“The history of computing has been a history of falling prices (and consequently expanding uses). But the arrival of cloud computing – which transforms computer processing, data storage, and software applications into utilities served up by central plants – marks a fundamental change in the economics of computing. It pushes down the price and expands the availability of computing in a way that effectively removes, or at least radically diminishes, capacity constraints on users. A PC suddenly becomes a terminal through which you can access and manipulate a mammoth computer that literally expands to meet your needs. What used to be hard or even impossible suddenly becomes easy.”

This is quite true, but continues and further entrenches the misapprehension that the Cloud is little more than an adjunct to the corporate data centre; a misapprehension that we shall get down to challenging in a moment.

First, though, there is a growing recognition that today’s market leaders will inevitably need to become more interoperable if this business segment – and they – are to grow. The proprietary nature of their offerings today may allow them to innovate ahead of the standards process (that will be shaped in large part by the lessons they learn), and the relatively high cost of switching to a competitor today may give each the critical mass upon which to invest and grow, but the characteristics of the current market are clearly the characteristics of a nascent market; computing’s new Wild West. As so often before, standardisation, true competition, mainstream adoption and commoditisation will all follow as we move toward phases 2 and 3 of Gartner analyst Thomas Bittman‘s intriguing ‘evolution of the Cloud Computing market.’ Similarly, Erica Naone offers a useful overview of Cloud Computing’s open source component in Technology Review this month. None of the projects she covers are a significant challenge to Amazon’s EC2, Microsoft’s Azure, Salesforce’s force.com or Google’s App Engine… yet. But together they help to keep these commercial entrants honest, and remind all of us that switching costs can be brought very low indeed if the pain of the status quo becomes too great.

Writing ‘Welcome to the Data Cloud?‘ for ZDNet last month, I began to explore the important role that data could and should play in the Cloud;

“Just as ‘we’ used to duplicate and under-utilise computational resources, so we do something very similar with our data. We expensively enter and re-enter the same facts, over and over again. We over-engineer data capture forms and schemas, making collection exorbitantly expensive, whilst often appearing to do all we can to limit opportunities for re-use. Under the all-too-easy banners of ’security’ and ‘privacy’ we secure individual data stores and fail to exploit connections with other sources, whether inside or outside the enterprise.

In a small way, the efforts of the Linked Data Project’s enthusiasts have demonstrated how different things should be. The cloud of contributing data sets grows from month to month, and the number of double-headed arrows denoting a two-way linkage is on the rise. Even the one-way relationships that currently dominate the diagram are a marked improvement on ‘business as usual’ elsewhere on the data Web; even in these cases, data from a third party is being re-used (by means of a link across the web) rather than replicated or re-invented. Costs fall. Opportunities open up. Both resources, potentially, improve. The strands of the web grow stronger.“

It is here, in the use and reuse of data, that the potential of the Cloud will be realised. Back in the previously cited conversation between Nick Carr and Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly himself came very close to saying so;

“In short, Google is the ultimate network effects machine. ‘Harnessing collective intelligence’ isn’t a different idea from network effects, as Nick argues. It is in fact the science of network effects - understanding and applying the implications of networks.

I want to emphasize one more point: the heart of my argument about Web 2.0 is that the network effects that matter today are network effects in data. My thought process (outlined in The Open Source Paradigm Shift and then What is Web 2.0?, went something like this:

1.  The consequence of IBM’s design of a personal computer made out of commodity, off- the-shelf parts was to drive attractive margins out of hardware and into software, via Clayton Christensen’s ‘law of conservation of attractive profits.’ Hardware became a low margin business; software became a very high margin business. 
2.  Open source software and the standardized protocols of the Internet are doing the same thing to software. Margins will go down in software, but per the law of conservation of attractive profits, this means that they will go up somewhere else. Where? 
3.  The next layer of attractive profits will accrue to companies that build data-backed applications in which the data gets better the more people use the system. This is what I’ve called Web 2.0.

It’s network effects (perhaps more simply described as virtuous circles) in data that ultimately matter, not network effects per se.”
(my emphasis) 

Talis CTO Ian Davis would appear to agree, commenting;

“People need to be  investing in their data as the long term carrier of value, not the applications around them… the data is more likely to persist than the software so it’s important to get the data right and take care of it.”

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, too, used his Dreamforce User Conference this month to move a company long associated with the ‘data centre extending’ Cloud firmly in the direction of embracing data and the network. As Krishnan Subramanian noted on Cloud Ave before the keynote,

“Till now, the Force.com platform served business users to develop apps that can be used internally within an organization. They have to tap into Force.com APIs from outside platforms to offer customer facing web apps. With the new initiative, it becomes easy for customers to allow the internet users to “interact” with their data.”

Over on VentureBeat, Anthony Ha had more;

“Salesforce.com wants to become an even big player in the cloud computing market with a new service called Force.com Sites, which allows companies to host public-facing web applications in the Force.com platform. That means Salesforce — nominally a maker of customer relationship management (CRM) software, but also an increasingly important platform for business-related applications — is moving closer to direct competition with cloud giants like Amazon Web Services and the Google App Engine.”

Locked away within an organisation, and only accessed by that organisation’s applications, data cannot be put to full use. Much of the value in each individual datum lies in comparing it to other measurements, in delving into detail and in pulling right back to observe the bigger picture.

Organisations believing that either the big picture or the detail reside within their own systems alone are woefully misguided. Even the most specialised, the most proprietary, the most confidential of data only reveal their true value when placed in context, and that context is all the richer when informed by numerous perspectives.

Cloud Computing, and the various *aaS movements, have finally brought us to a place where the fiercely guarded and tightly delineated boundaries between the organisation and those outside it may become permeable in ways that should benefit the organisation rather than threaten it. Data is just a resource. In the terminology of Geoffrey Moore most data is often mere context, and there are savings to be made both in reusing the data of others or in re-selling necessary context to those prepared to pay. Some data, of course, is core to the business, and this may continue to receive the same reverence and protection that we misguidedly apply to the entire database today. Even here, though, the opportunities afforded by (controlled?) sharing may outweigh any desire to maintain data protectionism.

The language of Groundswell offers opportunities to go further, to embrace and to exploit the behaviours and the motivations of customers and the wider Web.

There is clearly far more to write in clarifying this view of both the components and the whole, but as it passes 2,000 words this particular blog post has perhaps gone on long enough.

For now, then, I should conclude by asking what role the Semantic Web has to play in any of this.

The Semantic Web, with its unadulterated recognition of the primacy of the web’s hyperlink? The Semantic Web, designed from the outset to convey context and relationships derived from data spread across the Web? The Semantic Web, supported by technologies that operate openly and at Web scale?

Isn’t it obvious yet?

Returning to the Web 2.0 Summit with which this post began, another presentation was from Kevin Kelly, founding editor of Wired Magazine. As I wrote this post, I referred to Steve Gillmor and Nicole Ferraro, from whose reports I inferred that Kelly had built upon an earlier presentation (that I greatly enjoyed), in which he argued;

“You have to be open to having your data shared… which is a much bigger step than just sharing your web pages or your computer.”

Fact-checking before hitting publish, I notice that last week’s video is now up, here, and Kevin’s championing of the primacy of data in the cloud resonates with every word I’ve just written.

Yep. Here we go, on a journey toward Kevin Kelly’s “World Wide Database.”

In subsequent posts I’ll explore some more of the detail, and I hope you’ll stick around for the journey.

Storm Clouds image © ‘shidairyproduct‘ 2008. Shared on Flickr, and licensed with a Creative Commons Attribution License. Converted to a jigsaw by Big Huge Labs.