Here.

I still think it is <<insert strong adjective here>> that none of the major content companies other than Google have in any way supported Google’s stand here. At the very least, they could publicly say that they admire Google’s point of view. It costs them nothing, and does have an impact as we can see from some of the rather angry official Chinese utterances on Google’s stance lately.

If you want to know, read through this slide presentation put together by Joint Venture Silicon Valley and the Silicon Valley Community Foundation. It aggregates a wealth of data.

One thing that struck me particularly: it says that 45% of all people speak a language other than English at home. That is more than the third of people who were foreign-born.

What’s the next decade going to be like in technology?

I found myself pondering this a lot recently. It seems we are in for very revolutionary changes … like the becoming irrelevance of the PC. Or the move to NoSQL. Or all web apps being connected to each other, with RSS/Atom and OpenID being the first steps. Vendors, products, architectures, market dynamics will all be a lot different than we are used to.

Clearly worth pondering, or writing about it. Which not many people do. So I just started a new blog at:

upon2020.com

My focus will be the next decade, through 2020, thus the name, which of course is also a word play.

I am taking the risk that I might be terribly wrong with anything I might predict. It might be terribly embarrassing. But then, I hope to have a thought now and then that might spark some discussion, which is really all one can hope with on a blog.

So, enjoy! And disagree, otherwise, how should we all learn?

This blog will continue as before.

It was at the end of 2004 when I decided to start telling the world about this silly little idea I had had about a year before: give every person on the internet a URL that they could use to identify themselves to any website. Fully decentralized, no permission needed from anybody, under control of the user and so simple to implement and host, it could literally be everywhere.

This week the OpenID Foundation announced that now, exactly 5 years later, more than one billion identity URLs (now called OpenIDs) are operational on the internet. Not bad, I’d say. From 1 to a billion makes a compound annual growth rate of something like 6300%, over five years.

Time to compare the original vision with what it turned out to be. Well, some salient aspects of it anyway:

I did not run for the OpenID Foundation’s Board of Directors this year. I think I’m done there: I’m more of an inventor and innovator and entrepreneur than somebody excited about the daily grind of non-profit work of getting those billion OpenIDs used more every day, one day at a time.

Looking backwards, I think I need to be supremely amazed that this “silly” idea has had such amazingly powerful legs to walk that far. To be clear, if I hadn’t thought of it (and my wife Tammy hadn’t prototyped it), somebody else would have within a couple of years, most likely. And many, many people brought their ideas into the picture without which we would not have come to where we are. Thank you all, this is a story of collective barnraising. Success always has many fathers parents, and I mean that sincerely; in this case probably about a dozen. But still, it’s amazing to look back and trace a straight line over 5 years to the idea of the barn in the first place, and its basic architecture. Here it is, the barn, 5 years later, a billion strong. Not many times that anybody can claim to have had a hand in sparking something that became billions.

The jury is still out whether any meaningful money can be made around this. But I’m getting more optimistic: a billion is hard to ignore, in particular if all major players are on board, which they are. So going into 2010, I’m feeling like it’s time to do some serious business, and I think I know just where to start (contact me if you like)

So far, so good

Happy Holidays to you all!!

I just carried out two big boxes. All music CDs have been banned from our house, starting immediately.

No more music?

Nope. Just the realization that all our CD collection still does is collecting dust and taking up space. I don’t remember when I last inserted a CD into the stereo. It must have been years.

The precious, precious collection … has long turned into an ugly dust collector.

All 75GB of it are now sitting on a RAID array, with local copies for iTunes, iPods and iPhones, from where it sings.

It’s a bit of an emotional event. So many of these CDs come with emotions when holding them in my hands. The first three I ever bought, together with the first CD player. The one that was a present from a dear friend when we were in college. The ones that made it to every party. Just having music in the cloud is not the same thing. But it’s time to say good-bye and move on.

I shudder at the amount of money we must have paid the music industry over the years. These boxes are heavy! iTunes says it’s more than 19 days of 24 hours a day of music. But they all fit on 5% of a hard drive Amazon sells for $90 today. The $4.50 of disk space is when you know the music industry has a real problem.

My son won’t ever have the emotion of holding a disc of music he relates to. He will have other emotions that I can’t even guess.

The end of an era.