[p2p-research] Fwd: P2P Technology Ideas

Thu Jun 3 05:50:21 CEST 2010

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Sepp Hasslberger <sepp at lastrega.com>
Date: Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 6:27 PM
Subject: Re: P2P Technology Ideas
To: Adam Sobieski <adamsobieski at hotmail.com>
Cc: Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>, Samuel Rose <
samuel.rose at gmail.com>

Thank you for this mail Adam,

I believe we should distinguish between a general archiving of the data that
have been made available on the net and the archiving that will eventually
have to be thought out for all the conversations generated on a future p2p
type parallel or sub net.

For the www itself, yes, it would be great to have, for instance, all paper
and magazine morgue files available, not just to historians but as a
generally searchable data base that provides a record of all print
publications back to as far as we can possibly make it. In a wide sense,
this would include book initiatives such as Google's scanning of orphan and
out of print works and making those available. This alone would be a huge
and very worthwhile project.

The Internet Archive seems to be doing a good job of archiving the
conversations that happen on the net today, articles on websites and
discussions. Social networking sites have a lot of valuable conversation
going on, and I am not so sure this is being included in what's currently
archived. After all, here we have a huge number of communications, many of
them frivolous but also many serious ones, the totality of which is not
visible anywhere except on facebook's own servers. Each user only gets what
pertains to their friends, and only a selection of what is considered more
interesting, but that user-specific rendering then vanishes into a long tail
of conversations that are no longer easily accessible much less searchable.

On the p2p side, a similar problem will present itself, but with the caveat
that we won't even have a central server to refer back to, or to spider for
the record of what is happening. As you say, distributed spidering will
probably be needed, but what about the locale of storage? History
departments will be interested in having access to that data, but they will
not be necessarily the best custodians for the raw stuff.

Tentatively, I see a way of handling this by leveraging the computing and
storage power our own computers have. Take email conversations, for
instance. People have a lot of data in those conversations, including
attachments, which are being kept by email clients on some of our computers.
Then each one of us has some sort of storage system for interesting files on
their own computers. With a p2p direct net developing, there is going to be
more and more of that type of data sitting on our computers, partially
replicated on other computers, but nowhere collected into a coherent story
or centrally archived for later retrieval and historical interest study.

I am thinking people should be made aware of this and a discussion started,
with the aim of preserving the data on people's hard disks for historical
evaluation. I would have never said such a thing a decade ago, but ... our
notion of privacy is changing and, after some time has passed, all that data
does seem much less personal. For instance, we are happy to have the
correspondence archives of the scientists of the past, which at the time
they might not have opened for public access. Only with their passing have
the archives become accessible to researchers. Something very similar should
probably be envisioned for people's hard drives. Perhaps a "donate your old
drive" or "donate your backup to historical archives" type campaign could
help in this, or it could be done by spidering and archiving.

My point: We are moving away from a server based model (where archiving was
fairly straightforward) towards a more user-based model, where everyone
keeps their own data of interactions (conversations) with others and
associated connected media files. We will therefore need to re-think the way
we archive those conversations for future generations. Technology advances
will help in unexpected ways, but perhaps the basic model should be in place
before p2p really starts taking off.

Kind regards
Sepp

 On 02/giu/10, at 05:42, Adam Sobieski wrote:

Sepp,

Thanks for posting that message on Ning.

As an email to you based on a mutual interest in archival functionality of
and by distributed systems:

I think that new technology can in the not too distant future emerge such
that P2P software can archive itself for historical purposes.  So, with the
aforementioned distributed blogosphere system, understanding that content
constantly arrives, we can imagine that perhaps a time interval is the short
term memory or working memory.  Some system models include working, short,
medium and long term data storage.  This is a part of the complex topic of
the distributed blogs and forums.

How do we archive these things for ourselves and for future historians?  We
can design this into distributed systems to provide information search and
retrival for recent data, with distributed computation compressing that into
medium term memory (large compressed files available for segmented download)
then those automatically get sent to archivists, potentially university
history departments around the world.  Those would be searchable as well.

Things like news, blogs, tweets, the searching of each of these typically is
presented over a time window.  These happen to each have constantly arriving
data.  This dream of yours is important then to systems design.  History
departments around the world could receive archival data from systems that
generate such data.  The web does not automatically generate such data, thus
distributed systems can do distributed spidering as well.  Summarily, we see
one or two web archive web sites where, instead, we might petition for the
data to be replicated or routed to all of the history departments.  I want
them to also have all broadcast content over newspaper, magazines, radio,
television and cable television since the advent of each.

Specific to archiving of and by distributed systems, my initial thoughts on
the implementation related details are: multicore compression, distributed
compression, segmented downloading of large archive files, search and
retrieval of them and potentially of items in those files, and routing these
over time to repositories such as those at history departments.

Cheers,

Adam

------------------------------
CC: adamsobieski at hotmail.com; p2presearch at listcultures.org;
samuel.rose at gmail.com
From: sepp at lastrega.com
Subject: Re: P2P Technology Ideas
Date: Tue, 1 Jun 2010 12:17:37 +0200
To: michelsub2004 at gmail.com

Hi Michel and Adam,

I have posted the message from Adam on the Ning site at this address:

http://p2pfoundation.ning.com/forum/topics/advancing-p2p-technology

People can comment there, and perhaps a conversation can develop.

Kind regards
Sepp

 On 01/giu/10, at 03:06, Michel Bauwens wrote:

 Thanks for sharing this Adam, I hope you get some reactions,

Michel

On Tue, Jun 1, 2010 at 7:14 AM, Adam Sobieski <adamsobieski at hotmail.com>
wrote:

P2P Foundation,

Hello.  My name is Adam Sobieski.  I am a technologist who makes various
software including artificial intelligence, distributed computing and P2P
approaches to distributed computing.  Lately, some of my focus has been upon
e-learning applications, broadening e-learning capabilities and
technologies.  Additionally, an interest of mine is increasing the ease of
multimedia use and publishing by end-users, and increasing multimedia to
include interactive video.  We can imagine audio and video blogs, as well as
forums and interactive spaces.

I am interested in encouraging the creation of and search and retrieval of
blogs and forums in intuitive ways, encouraging the expression of opinion by
end-users, encouraging connections between people, content discovery,
socialization, participation in civil society without motivated actors in
their midst, and otherwise empowering end-users through technology that
facilitates their expression of their reactions to the world around them as
well as the expression of their desires with regard to their world.  I view
peer-to-peer networking as the logical technology upon which to construct
next-generation blogs and forums.

I would also like developers to be aware of all the P2P libraries and
utilities that exist.  I would like to be more participative somehow in
providing resources to developers to create new solutions on the P2P area.

I would also like to encourage somehow academic rapid prototyping of new
research artifacts atop existing applications, clients, browsers, various
objects where a branch or modification of an open source project can rapidly
and effectively communicate an idea in a participative way with the
scientific community in the form of the artifact and related publications.
This, in my opinion, benefits all of the involved scientists and facilitates
additional communication between scientists through constructed variations
of artifacts exhibiting prototypical research functionality.

Also, we can imagine a distribution network for RSS about new software,
versions and modules in the P2P area.  I feel that every developer has an
interest in the means of connecting with interested end-users, additionally
many software have web-based means of apprising users to the release of
versions.  I would like to see this integrated into a desktop taskbar
notification area as opposed to each application running a separate process
to poll a web service to periodically check if an application popup is
required.  This an integration methodology for new components and
versionings can be of use.  In particular as live distributed applications
have more complex versioning scenarios.  I view "distributed versioning" as
a pragmatic complexity that can be alleviated with a shared network resource
providing a service to end-users as well as allowing bolder advancements.
The means by which distributed applications version in a distributed manner
and the means by which end-users are apprised of new components and modules
of interest to them.  I think that we developers would like that, that with
an integrated widget, possibly on the taskbar.  Desktop integrated software
arrival and versioning notification through a decentralized and distributed
resource or network combined with user settings and ergonomics.

I wanted to introduce myself, say hello and indicate the above idea for a
distributed resource.  I'm composing also some ideas regarding
implementations of completely decentralized distributed peer-to-peer
blogging and forum systems.  If anybody knows of existing research in those
areas I'd be interested in reading the science in that area.

Cheers,

Adam Sobieski

------------------------------
Date: Mon, 31 May 2010 21:18:39 +0700
Subject: Re: P2P Technology Ideas
From: michelsub2004 at gmail.com
To: adamsobieski at hotmail.com
CC: p2presearch at listcultures.org; sepp at lastrega.com

Dear Adam,

there are 2 ways to discuss this topic, one is via Ning, where sepp in cc
has been following and moderating tech-discussions, and the other one is
here on this mailing list,

a solution is to present your project both here on the list and at ning (
http://p2pfoundation.ning.com) and then pursue the discussion on Ning, but
staying on this list is fine as well,

michel

On Mon, May 31, 2010 at 8:35 AM, Adam Sobieski <adamsobieski at hotmail.com>
wrote:

P2P Foundation Team,

I wanted to share some ideas with regard to P2P technological advancements.
Is there a forum or group that discusses new P2P technology ideas?  I
specifically have ideas for P2P applications in the space of blogs and
forums; that is, a completely decentralized blogosphere not requiring web
search and what could be called NNTP 2.  I would like to refine these ideas
with colleagues, explore collaborations and learn about other new projects
underway.

Thanks,

Adam Sobieski

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