The NOSE

In Search of Inexpensive, Reliable, and Secure Personal Storage & Backup

If you read this blog then you are in the highest percentile group on the planet that generates personal digital files. (Let's not think about our collective contribution to global warming and what it takes to generate, transform, and store the ever growing quantity of digital information.)

If you are like me, then you have probably been lax about backing up the bits you really care about or later will wish you had cared about. Sure the price of external drives has gone down (a Terabyte of storage can be had these days for under $300) and software such as Time Machine in Leopard makes backups pretty much idiot proof. If you are ahead of the curve, then you probably have an USB-type external drive or are religiously backing up to CDs or DVDs.

But we know these drives will fail. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But one day it will fail. And if that's your only copy of a critical file, then what? I have been using .Mac but it's a relatively expensive and Mac-centric option.

Taku Tokuyasu put me on to a solution that works. It's called Jungle Disk and is "powered by Amazon's S3". S3, the backend technology, is in itself an amazing story and worth looking at as a highly scalable storage service for enterprises.

First, Jungle Disk is one of the cheaper solutions out there (15 cents per gigabyte) for personal storage. Second, it's highly reliable and highly available because the data is stored in multiple datacenters around the country. Third, it's easy to use. It can be used in one of two modes, or both. Under the first option the drive appears as a mapped drive in Macintosh, Windows, or Linux. Under the second option  one can use the backup and restore features of the software to automate archiving. Fourth, the file transfer files seem to be relatively fast compared to the alternatives. (I haven't done a systematic evaluation.) There are also some nice security features which I will describe in a later posting. I chose the JungleDisk Plus option, which provides additional features for only $1 more per month.

In short, I think for me the search for inexpensive, reliable, and secure personal storage is settled. At least for now.

Best Session at Educause Learning Initiative 2008 Conference

There were many excellent sessions at this year's ELI 2008 Conference. Among the very best was "Data Visualization: Making Meaning Out of Mountains of Data" by George Siemens and Cyprien P. Lomas.

What made the session among the best? It's rare for me that a presentation opens up an entire area for thought and exploration. It's become a cliche that we are experiencing an information explosion.  But what is the solution to the "data smog" that we all live in?

Siemens and Lomas began by noting that we have seen an explosion this past decade in information generation tools (wikis, blogs, podcasts, datasets, etc.). We have also seen steady growth in the availability of aggregation tools through technologies such as RSS. However, data and information tools are still embryonic. For the most part we lack tools that allow us to make meaning of the mounds of data we confront on a daily basis. To be sure there are very powerful domain-specific tools, but these have tended to be obscure and inaccessible to the ordinary bloke.

To motivate the discussion Siemens and Lomas played a Ted Talk video of Hans Rosling, who beautifully demonstrates the power of data visualization. Check out the Rosling video (especially the first five minutes): the guy is a scream.

Siemens and Lomas then demonstrated a variety of tools, including gapminder, twitterblocks, xobni, quintara, and many eyes. Many Eyes seemed the most interesting of the bunch and worthy of more in depth exploration. You can set up a free account and start playing. (Note that all the data sets that you upload is public and accessible to everyone.)

In summary, the session really opened up my eyes to the power of visualization. The tools are still embryonic but becoming accessible, affordable and powerful very quickly. This will be fun area to track technology progress.

Notes: On his blog Siemens has an Elluminate recording of a similar session in early 2007.

Why Use a Desktop RSS Reader?

I have rediscovered RSS. The past few months I have been inundated at work and accessing my news feeds through the klunky Google reader just wasn't making the cut as a priority.

Last night I went to the NewsGator web site to purchase NetNewsWire (NNW), which I had used previously and liked. To my pleasant surprise NNW is now free and synchronizes nicely with NewsGator. I was also able to get the NewsGator feed working quickly on my iPhone, a nice bonus.

I whole-heartedly agree with Nick Bradbury's post "Why Use a Desktop RSS Reader". I would add one more item to the list of why use a desktop RSS reader: a cleaner user interface.

Sun's Project Darkstar and the Next Generation Learning Platform

Last week I had the opportunity to meet Sun's Chief Gaming Officer Chris Melissinos. Over lunch and at a panel discussion at St. Paul College (recently recognized as a Sun Center of Excellence) we had a wide ranging conversation about the future of educational technology, gaming, and internet culture. The event was graciously hosted by Warren Sheaffer of St. Paul College and Robert Reagan of Sun Microsystems.

Why am I so interested in gaming? I believe that the next generation learning platform will see a convergence of three elements: virtual worlds, gaming, and learning management systems. Gaming will become an essential part of learning and Sun's Project Darkstar is quickly emerging as the leading open source contender in this space. Wonderland, which sits on top of Darkstar, is Sun's equivalent of Second Life. Many of us are experimenting in Second Life but the future of education in Virtual Worlds, especially once we factor in the needs of the enterprise, will more likely go in the direction of environments such as Darkstar+Wonderland. (If you want to know about the potential of research collaboration in these types of spaces, check out Sun's MPK20.)

The current LMS, which we are all familiar with, will need to evolve from the currently bloated monolithic crapware to a true Learning Management Operating System (LMOS). The learning platform of the future will need a substrate that performs the mundane but essential bookkeeping functions such as authentication, authorization, and integration with backend systems. The LMOS should look more like the linux kernel: a lean, mean traffic cop that sits below the application layer and mediates access to common services.

Is there a Blackboard killer on the horizon? Yes. Forces such as Project Darkstar are gaining momentum in the education galaxy. Learning management systems that are not open source friendly or patent friendly will increasingly be at risk.

From Web 2.0 to Web 3.0

As reported in the NY Times ("Entrepreneurs See a Web Guided by Common Sense"), entrepreneurs are beginning to focus on the next step in the evolution of internet technology, or what is being described as the shift from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0 technologies.

"The classic example of the Web 2.0 era is the “mash-up” — for example, connecting a rental-housing Web site with Google Maps to create a new, more useful service that automatically shows the location of each rental listing."

Web 3.0 is based on the semantic web and will use artificial intelligence and data mining. It will allow users to get a reasonable answer to simple questions such as: 

“I’m looking for a warm place to vacation and I have a budget of $3,000. Oh, and I have an 11-year-old child.”

Web 3.0 is coming and much sooner than one might think.