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In my talks on PICNIC'07 about Sharism, some people commented that it is actually the new bottle of old theory of Communism. I think he may not really understand the real meaning of Sharism though I myself also carefully introduce the new term. And it's a concept to be evolved by itself.

Sharism(分享主义 in Chinese) is about sharing, for sure. It means a tendency of sharing your works(everything) to be used by your social network(or public domain), but still keep your right and property based on your consensus. It's really not strange concept especiall after blogging and web 2.0 stuffsemerged for years. As well those new copyright movements, like Creative Commons. You can practise sharism anytime by communicating with others, writing blogs, posting photos, or organizing an offline meetup to generate some group discussions, etc. And step by step, you can feel the change course that you are becoming more open-minded.

An avoidable question raised along sharism. What's the incentive to people if they would like to share? The answer if very simple. You share one piece, you can get times of return. The current social norm may always suggest people that be careful of sharing, otherwise you will lose control of your own stuff, or maybe very dangrous to love prvicy? Is it true? Let me use a metaphor to tell you that actually sharing is in a new space that won't hurt your privcy, instead it shows new possibilities and upside to everyone.


As the figure shows above. There are a big gap between privacy and publicity today that many people may not realize. So actually, the knowledge spectrum could be broken to most of us. The gap,however, has big potential to become a valuable space for social creation and sharing. Many people, however, still have no idea how to bridging the gap because they are over-concerned about privacy. It's not strange because there are still many abuse on Internet that people can't afford to fight with those bad behaviors with individual power. However, it's also a paradox. The less you share, the less power you have. And the more you share, the possible you get social support and become seems-virtually but truely powerful. You can start from small practise, e.g. from a personal blog, harvest small. Then decide how to invest more to get larger return. The gap will transform into a social space belongs to yourself can eventually can help you to maximize your social capital.

Sharism is human nature long timeline of life. It should be accumulated everyday, instead of looking forward any favors from others. And it can be practised anytime anywhere without insulting others right. So its not a big untouchable utopoia like Communism, nor absued political hype of Socialism. It's actually very personalized mindset and practical spirit. Those really experienced blogging, web 2.0 and creative commons, can easily understand what's the real meaning of sharism. Even those people with suspicious and concerns to sharism can find the value of sharism if they try to publish their opinions online, try it! :)

Labels: Communism, Sharism, Socialism, 分享主义

I'm now in Amsterdam attending PICNIC'07 and visiting some old friends. PICNIC'07 is really fancy event but it's the first time I'm linking with this fusion. Though it's still conference 1.0(means it's highly well organized). it's much different from those boring traditional conferences, on both format and content desgin.

The whole event is actually held in Westergasfabriek, a park orginally a warehouse used to store industrial gas. Liu Yan, Director of DaTong China Desk and my host for this event, told me that it took about two years to bury and cover those wasted stuffs of the old factory. Now the park is a cultural facility well used for creative conferences and activities and of course it's also a good place for community usages. (I just saw a big chicken idol jumpped over the conference hall, you can see such fun stuffs in this confernce appear anywhere)

I met Biz Stone, the co-founder of Twitter(as well Odeo and Xanga, etc.), for the first morning here. It's very interesting that his real name is Isaac, same to me. And we joked together how people rest of us always make mis-spelling on "Isaac"(not Issac"). I think Biz must be very suprise how I am addict to Twitter and was with ODEO.

One of my best friends, Kaiser Kuo, was also invited to speak at PICNIC. He is really qualified to several aspects of the event since he was a rock star, colunumist and digital strategy guru. Since he is so qualified, he was scheduled with several talks and one keynote. Ha, he is gifted and well used.

I will speak the next afternoon in a panel called "Creative Entrepreneurship in China". It would be the second time I talked about creation in China and the business opportunities. The last time was in Beijing on "TTI Vanguard" conference. The topic is actually around why there are more and more creations emerged in China but why there are still many failures and risks to entrepreneurship in China. I was interviewed recently by Economist on the copycats phenomena in China and where's the original innovations. But the article didnt' mention my concern on the harms of creations from commited censorhips in front of Chinese people everyday. For example, just for this post, I really hesitate whether I should post some images from my Flickr collections on PICNIC or not because I know my readers in China won't be able to see those pictures as Flickr was blocked there. Maybe I have enough time to talk about it tomorrow, though I will still emphasize the blosom of Chinese creations in these 2.0 age...

Labels: Amsterdam, Creation, Creativity, PICNIC

Many foreigners attending World Economy Forum(Dalian) were cheering with Primeir Wen's remarks on "peaceful development". I don't want to argue it's right or wrong to many new comers to China and such platitudes speech. Because the "harmonioius society" theory from ruling party seems only best worked on censorship till now. Anyone attended WEF Dalian experienced actuall censorship when they want to access Flickr, Wordpress and BBC News, etc. Also some peopel found that Twitter is not stable in these days. They may not even know the recent mass crackdowns around the country to those IDCs and thousands of web site just because a new five year ruling party congress is coming.

Internet censorship system ever had a beautiful nick name GFW(Great Firewall) and now has a new Chinese kidding name Kongfu Net(Gong Fu Wang in Pinyin). The problem is now becoming more and more serious in China. But don't just tell the reason in a simple way(for Party Congress, etc.). Actually, it actually reveals the indepth social problems(food safte underneath water for years. "The more of ropes they throw out, the faster they hang themselves", another WEF blogger attendee said to me yesterday. I was shocked by the words, but totally believe it's true.

Interestingly, I found different behaviors of GFW at different places in Dalian. In WEF conference hall. I can never access Twitter site. However, it's possible in Hotel. And they share the same list of other banned sites(including Feedburner, Wikipedia Chinese, Wordpress, Flickr picture server, etc.) It could be caused by the uncompleted deployment to the distributed GFW blacklist to different ISPs and areas. The GFW blacklist is guessed a centralized database but synchorized to distributed gateway routers to different ISPs in different provinces. It's not so sure yet whether local authorities can access their respective gateway to edit the blacklist because we alwasy get report from users in different locations. But basically, we can be sure today that the centralized system is there.

Anyway, it's very interesting topic that GFW meets WEF. Its the real world of how China meets the world. How totalitarian meets open society. And how reality meets future. The interaction of China and world may face more and more such mindset conflictions in the coming decade, but we can believe the universal value of humanity can eventually win the future.

Labels: Dalian, GFW, WEF, World Economy Forum

(We are now in UBC Cafe to continue SBF meeting. As Ilya's talking on APAN conference in Xi'an, I backchannelled to write about the other parts of P2R computing. )

P2R computing is a new framework based on P2P computing. But the nodes becomes mixture of people and robots. And the interactions between people and robots become the new links of the new computing model. Thus it's totally different from P2P computing. The P2P computing was actually Peer to Peer, not people to people. So it's actually missing the link with social computing. Actually P2R is a really social+machine computing model which can transfer users micro-instruction into automatic computing.

Based on P2R base idea, we can see a big scenario that everyone has a robot hosted on some distributed server farms. Those robtos comsumes both computing power and storage of server machines. Thus the Internet can become real computing platform. However, those robots are not like crawlers from today's search engine because they are still machine insects without human interactions. The personal robots, however, serve only to their owners. In this way, the robot and the owner become a joint social identity of the real person. The relationship between People and Robot, can generate different scenarios: People2People, People2Robot, and Robot2Robot, etc. So P2R Computing actually can cover today's P2P computing range, also extend to future social computing realm.

I will try to follow the meme and discuss with more friends to generate more detailed architecture in a public way. I would appreciate your comments to see if we share the same ideas in any emergent angles.

Labels: Computing, P2P, P2R, Robot, Singularity

I was sleepless last night because of the meta memes and ideas of P2R(People to Robot) computing. I told my friend Ilay Eric Lee this morning that I'm afraid I can't drive fast enough because i was over exited the whole late half night. We are now in Zhujiajiao, a suburb town of Shanghai city with traditional China ancient water view. The Bum Cafe is very comfortable that we can enjoy the view and tea from the wooden frame window. So we can be more free talking about my memes last night.

The meme, is about People to Robot computing. I'm in long term addict to AI in last 10 years and followed the trace of some futurist like Ray Kurzweil about Singularity for a long time. The bridge between Singularity and today is machine computing. And more detailed, some intelligent agents running and serve people's requirements. The problem we are facing today is all the agent software(or generally termed as "robot") are not personalized for a specified individual. So I think there must be a new era for the interaction of People to Robot beyond today's P2P computing.

The idea is very simple: everyone of us will have a robot(or more) service running somewhere on Internet that helps you process any tasks with instant interactions. You can chat with the robot anytime and delegate tasks to robot to accomplish in a queue or get immediate responses for some questions. The concept won't be new to many people who ever played with IM robots. However, those robots are not for personalized missions, e.g. backup some files to server. The personlized missions will cover all human activities like Q&A, search, streaming entertainment and data backup, etc. If you delegate all those tasks to a robot, who can also represent you to communicate and collaborate with other people(or their robots as well), it will be very computing power consuming, for sure. So it can should be well designed on architecture to ensure both functionalities and privacy protections. (Now it's time to back Shanghai, the post is to be coninued...)

Labels: Computing, P2P, P2R, Singularity