lyndonwong.com

Organized for the 2006 SF Marathon
Originally uploaded by Lyndon Wong.

Gathered up some key items on the evening before the 2006 San Francisco Marathon, and found the montage of gear and fuel rather eye-catching, so I caught it for posterity.

The event was great fun, shared with various SFRRC running friends under beautiful weather conditions. I came in around my goal, completing the 2nd half course in 2:01:33, beating my time in the first half of the 2005 SF Marathon by nearly 10 minutes.

Hindery Fatwa on Portals
Originally uploaded by lyndon.

After the final demise of ExciteAtHome in 2002, I reflected a bit on my experience with the Internet Bubble, and among other things, read “The Internet’s Coming of Age” a 2001 publication of the U.S. National Academies drafted by a committee including ExciteAtHome CTO Milo Medin and future Google CEO Eric Schmidt. This monograph outlined how the architects of the Internet foresaw the relationships between content (data), services (software applications) and distribution (network connectivity). One key attribute of the Internet architecture is the separation between the network layer and the application layer, deliberately putting the ‘intelligence’ of new services at the edges of the network (where servers executed software), and keeping the pipe ‘dumb’ (see CSTB 2001). The architects expected this would make innovation on the Internet easier, by eliminating any network dependencies when deploying a new application. If Internet application developers seem to be eating the lunch of the cable and telecom companies, it’s in some respects a natural consequence of how the Internet was designed to work. Had the arrangements been different, the concept of “Internet-speed development” would not have arisen, and today’s Web would have evolved for the worse.

Because each of these three legs – content, applications and distribution – requires substantial investment in capital, human or otherwise, I find rather comical the recent remarks by former @Home board member Leo Hindery on the impending death of the major Web portals. The economic role of portals is more accurately reflected by the Web applications they host than by the content they present. The expertise required to conceive of and deploy these software applications is quite distinct from the talent to create content (merely data to a software developer) or the logistical muscle to build physical networks (all those truck rolls for installing broadband access everywhere). The disparate nature of these talents contributed to the failure of convergence via vertical integration at AOL-TimeWarner and ExciteAtHome.

But there’s no need to belabor the point further. The reaction of the blog-o-sphere (e.g. TechDirt, John Battelle) makes better reading. Twenty years from now, we’ll all share a good laugh, because these bits will still be around for everyone to read with bemusement. In the meantime, let us hope that only a minimal amount of investment capital will get mis-allocated along the way.

Tags: convergence, lyndonwong

Cooqy Screen Shot
Originally uploaded by lyndon.

Just discovered the Cooqy environment for eBay shoppers this weekend while catching up with Sarah Allen’s blog. Very inviting environment built with the eBay developer APIs and OpenLaszlo. The project is still very much in progress, but already gaining some attention ( ZDNet | GigaOM | web search).

Tags: cooqy, openlaszlo, web2.0

Newscloud view of Google News
Originally uploaded by lyndon.

Neat little experimental front-end to an online news site. Found via digg at:
http://digg.com/technology/Google_News_Cloud

Ironman in Action at Wildflower 2006

Tom Knauer, a Hawaii Ironman qualifier and tireless evangelist of the triathlon sport, generously led over a dozen friends on a weekend RV trip to Wildflower 2006. He showed us all a wonderfully fun time, no matter what event we took on.

Here’s a much-deserved digital media toast to Tom:

May your pre-race bike tuning always go without a hitch:

And may you always finish with cheering crowds (note: video requires broadband connection and contains VERY LOUD crowd noise – adjust your speaker volume before play):

Thanks for sharing the joy of the sport , coaching a few of us through our first tentative steps, and for suffering all the unforseen headaches of pulling together this road-trip.

triathlon

Lunch 2006 May 3 Wed – sandwich
Originally uploaded by lyndon.

… then this flickr feed is my self-portrait in the making:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/lyndonwong/tags/eatinghabits/

I recently volunteered to subject my eating habits to analysis as part of a sports nutritional study. I’ve never known much about the topic, other than the notion of fueling up on carbohydrates before endurance activities like long runs.

To minimize the tedium of recording every little thing I ate, I had the brilliant idea of photographing my food (…a picture can capture a thousand calories in an instant, and digital cameras make it viable to record everything). Of course, vanity quickly set in, and I started to:

1. adjust my eating habits to make the photo stream look more flattering

2. leave out photos of some between-meal snacks

OK, so I cheated, just slightly… but overall, my little experiment hints at one of the many potential benefits of leading a transparent life, aided by social software. Imagine if all of us had photo streams of our daily food intake… and concerned friends, strangers, and nutritionists weighed in with comments.

Since the public appetite for ‘reality media’ seems quite high, this could one day trump watching silly television shows. I personally would love to follow what Lance Armstrong eats week-in and week-out.

My new homepage, 2006 Apr 23
Originally uploaded by lyndon.

Over the weekend, I re-organized my homepage and briefly mulled over whether to incorporate a 30Boxes calendar badge. Was I comfortable with anyone being able to see my calendar? My little dilemma seemingly frames the new generation gap, between the young who eagerly live their personal lives transparently on the Web, and the old who cautiously debate what to make private or public.

The new applications categorized under the “Web 2.0” moniker cater to a willingness to be open about one’s opinions, travels, schedule and interests. The old, especially outside of software-focused fields, find these ‘digital life’ sharing applications of limited relevance, and even caution the young to beware of the consequences of public expression when seeking future employment.

But how carefully groomed and scripted should all of us be from the moment we exist on the Web? What should a prospective employer, customer, friend or romantic partner think of any person who surfaces nothing authentic from a Web search? Whom should we trust? In the Internet Age, the important choice facing all of us is not whether to be digital or analog, but whether to be transparent or opaque.

lyndonwong | web2.0 | 30boxes

Wildflower For A Cause

Friend Mika Hirota is training to complete the long course (1.2 mile swim, 56 mile ride, 13 mile run) for this year’s Wildflower Triathlon , in part to raise several thousand dollars for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. She has set a wonderful goal on multiple fronts, and I’ve contributed via her donation page.

Tags: triathlon