 To make me move this to slightly more tangible stuff I think we quoted Tony Hearst really briefly in our piece and We could have probably written a lot more because I think you know the cult of Tony is I almost don't know about you but Tony Hearst is almost like a code bird I drop with people when I meet them at events and stuff and I'll mention his name and if their face lights up with recognition then I think okay, they're they're cool and if If they have no idea who he is, you know, I'll try to explain it And if they get it immediately then there might be some hope and then and then that you know Then there's the rest of them and and what I love about what Tony does is I think he embodies a certain spirit of the data artist and A guy who thinks very deeply but also you know the stuff he worked with When I first became familiar with him was technology that were so accessible to the rest of us You didn't need a massive You know data array lab and racks and racks of you know, hard equipment and access to computer scientists and AI people to do What he was doing he was using tools like Yahoo pipes and Google spreadsheets and stuff like that And so but he's he's gotten remarkably Depressed on his blog lately and there was something he wrote and it's actually did we actually have a section in our piece called innovation lost? Yeah, so he had an order he independently came up with a piece called innovation loss I'll just read a couple lines from it He's we used to build things around Amazon's API and Yahoo's API and Google's API's and Twitter's API and as those companies Innovated they built bare-bones services that they let others play with and the upstarts Let us play with their toys and we did because they were easy to play with but they're not anymore Now they're not something you can play with the toys became enterprise wares and now you need professional tools to play with them And that kind of aligns and he didn't even talk about RSS in that post. I think he does in another one It does kind of define how the kind of the shift and the playground has shifted and I remember when I was probably most enthusiastic and most Feeling creative in terms of DIY innovation. It was when you could play with the RSS feed off a tool like delicious or flicker and With next to no understand how underlying code worked you could hack this stuff together and As Tony noted, you know that kind of accessible framework for tinkering you have to dig deeper anyway if it exists Yeah, I mean I Tony I think is right on and I think the the question that I've been struggling with a little bit And I've been following some of the work of Ken Lane who reminds me a lot of Tony as does John Udalla I'll talk about a second but can Lane's been talking about, you know, API is at their best provide a kind of more robust Level of grabbing information from a variety of services But I think what Tony is alluding to which I think should give us some pause around the API move is The corporations who are running those services control them entirely, right? so there's no vision for open standards there's no vision for what's being shared and Open formats and so I think the API Question mark is while a lot of people are going in there There is a huge huge issue with how do we build? aggregated syndicated models around API's that we can't guarantee that will be around I mean, that's the thing that people are running into with Google Docs or Google Spreadsheets right now You know Google without offering a new API is changing the whole format with which they share their spreadsheet stuff on it That's screwing up a lot of these really kind of database lists Applications that Tony was doing four or five years ago like you know and so I think there's a big question I think his depression. I think if he's depressed, it's just a good sign that we're all going to be depressed in four or five years Exactly, so I mean I think that's kind of like, you know, you know the canary in the coal mine but I also I I do take some I do take some Hope or what I say I am a bit excited To hear John Udell talk about this notion of the trailing edge technologies and I think he's far more Optimistic whether rightly or wrongly that the work that was happening 10 or 15 years ago with these open formats Are going to return and the the web itself is going to kind of re-emerge as a space where people feel the freedom To grab RSS or to build open-source tools and that you know It's not going to be simply about which big service do I open up my data to and I think the main of one's own rightly or wrongly in terms of UMW was kind of hitching its vision to that star right It's hoping that you know these trailing edge technologies and by giving each student and faculty their own space To imagine and build in that they're going to actually not only learn something about the web and learn something about these platforms and the Applications, but they're actually going to see the unbelievable value in owning a certain amount of their data and being able if Google or Twitter or Flickr doesn't allow you to do certain things It's not going to stop you from doing them and it's not going to stop you from understanding exactly what it is They're doing to stop you from doing what you want to do and I think in some ways for me That notion of the user innovation toolkit that you Dell returns to when he's talking about these trailing edge technologies, right? Like, you know web hosting has it's not new RSS is not new, right? A lot of these things that we're kind of talking about is still radical They've been around for more than a decade and you know commodity web hosting It was affordable in 2003 the fact that no university really took it on as a teaching and learning mission is kind of It's mind-boggling when you think about it and I think his idea of giving every student faculty and staff member This user innovation toolkit in which they kind of can come into a deeper understanding of the web and a deeper understanding of what kind of defined higher-ed culture and Relationship to the web in the mid and early 90s as a kind of return in some ways to a moment of innovation and Not to a golden age of innovation. I'm not Pretending that because you know higher-ed didn't make it easy and geo cities emerged because they did make it easy And I just hope that higher-ed learns from some of its own mistakes But also some of its own great discoveries and kind of returns to this kind of position of empowerment for its constituents and actually understands its role as kind of enabling and Making possible innovations that move beyond a vendor driven relationship and move beyond the kind of simple Idea that hey, I don't have to think about the technology. So this is a win-win I mean, I think it's time for us to kind of return and I think the depression Maybe Tony feels and I don't want to speak for Tony is that very few people other than him even really realize it And that's a basic problem of literacy and so it's fascinating to me That maybe some of the things and some of the moves we make might be not so much around the technology per se but around the literacy of that technology and I think that's the direction. I'm interested in going more and more Which will get us out of the kind of you know notion of the field as here's the next tool, right? Here's the next that gizmodos change like what a animoto close, but here's Geomoto or Gaga moto or Godzilla moto It's like that tool chasing that churn where is is a dead end? I think we all kind of realized that after the last decade yeah, that's Yeah, kind of circles back to what we were talking about earlier where I was kind of It was struggling with how do we begin to engage more and more of the University community to realize that these issues are important and listening to you talk kind of reminded me You know as if we can pull more people onto the open web in one way or another and get them to kind of see This is their space to then hopefully some of these problems start to be seen as their problems too. I Do I think that idea of some kind of a shared sense of responsibility in this space? And you brought out the point in the in the article and this might be a gun a good note to end on is You brought out the Tim Berners-Lee stuff Invented the web 25 years ago and the point you made that I thought was so brilliant I think it was a really nice kind of capstone to the discussion was you know The web is an artificial creation Right like democracy like right the Constitution. It's like it only is as great as our involvement in it And I think this idea of us offloading any notion of of kind of involvement and that goes not just for the web it goes for all Points of our culture where we're falling down As a kind of you know informed organized Community It's an issue and it's an issue that I don't know if that's ed techs flag to bear Right. I don't know if that's our burden. That's our cross But damn it somebody's got to do it and if it starts an ed tech all the better Right, I can actually wake up and be happy about the job. I do well I think it would be I think it would be typically self-aggrandizing to both of us to think this is our mission but it's got to be everybody's and I guess that includes us, right? I guess we're included with everybody Hopefully, yeah, well on our good days