Marc's Voice

Case Connection Zone in the WSJ

The project we’re working on here at CWRU was written up in the WSJ today.  Unfortunately I can’t link to the full article, as it’s behind a paywall.

In it Lev Gonick (the CIO of CWRU) explains that we’re working on figuring out the recipes for success of ultra high-speed connectivity.

“What do you DO with a 1G connection?”

That is the question.

Now for some answers.

What we launch in late May ‘10 won’t be the final answer, but it’ll be a beginning.

By combining advanced health, energy, education and safety services, a personalized News page and a social network, with blogging, activity streams, live-video help, groups with media sharing we hope to start to answer the question.

Now throw in some compelling local content and services and you’ve got yourself a full fledged ultra high-speed dashboard 2.0.

And that is what is required of every Digital City.

DiSO Dashboard Outline proposal

I’ve been so immersed in writing up a treatise on how I see the world shaking out, I haven’t had time to get proactive and make specific contributions TO this world.

So here we go.  My birthday present to the world - on my birthday.

The following is the culmination of some ideas I’ve had for a long time on the importance of Dashboards in our distributed world.  I believe that Dashboards are a metaphor that ALL apps, services, blogs and social networks can share.  Certainly  NetVibes, iGoogle and Myyahoo can be considered Dashboards.

And Microsoft has one, and all social networks have them - in fact - I predict that ALL software will provide a ‘dashboard‘ to their users - if for no other reason, to hold their ‘identity’ in.

And when we all have something in common like a Dashboard, we can then have an Outline file (or page tags) which represents what the Dashboard contains - it’s content, your profile info and social graph, what modules and UI elements are INSIDE the Dashboard, what feeds you’ve subscribed to, it’s configuration info - everything.

So here’s the pitch:

The exciting stuff happens when you start to try and figure out how to do distributed friending or other kinds of distributed stuff. Having an outline of everything in the Dashboard will come in pretty handy.