Links on a theme in today’s roundup.

Union Square Ventures: Why The Flow Of Innovation Has Reversed:

. It used to be that innovation started with NASA, flowed to the military, then to the enterprise, and finally to the consumer. Today, it is the reverse. All of the most interesting stuff is being built first for consumers and is tricking back to the enterprise. I suggested that one reason this is happening is that the success of a web service is more often determined by its social engineering than its electrical engineering.

Jeremiah Owyang (of Forrester Research): Why ‘Friending’ Will Be Obsolete:

Like a baby, we’re teaching the ‘system’ our language, how to walk, how to coexist in our real flesh and blood world, the ‘system’ is just starting to show intelligence. One primary example of this is the use of hashtags in Twitter. We use the # sign to tag content so it’s easily to organize and find. That one # character isn’t native to our tongue (unless when you recite your grocery list and say “hashtag”) it’s another example of us speaking machine language in order to teach the system.

For example, I started a social experiment on Sunday, where I encouraged folks to tweet related music artists using the tag “#relatedmusic” you can see the database form when you search for that term -If we had enough people do this in my -and your- network we’d be able to build a reference engine that other music reccomendations services could pull from.

Search Engine Land: Danny Sullivan: The Google Hive Mind:

As Google turns 10 years old, that important birthday sees the company more powerful than ever before. With its competitors in disarray, the Big G seems likely to grow even further. The secret to its success? For me, it’s what I’ve been calling the “Google Hive Mind. ” Rather than follow a rigid top-down master plan, the company’s direction and success has been shaped by decisions often taken independently of how they’ll benefit the company as a whole. But collectively, those decisions DO form a master plan, a hive mind that dictates what the company will do.

Phil Windley’s Technometria: Alan Kay: Is Computer Science an Oxymoron?:

One of Alan’s undergraduate degrees is in molecular biology. He can’t understand it anymore despite having tried to review new developments every few years. That’s not true in computer science. The basics are still mostly the same. If you go to most campuses, there is a single computer science department and the first course in computer science is almost indistinguishable from the first course in 1960. They’re about data structures and algorithms despite the fact that almost nothing exciting about computing today has to do with data structures and algorithms.

The Internet is like the human body. It’s replaced all of its atoms and bits at least twice since it started even though the Internet has never stopped working. Attacks on the ‘Net aren’t really attacks on the ‘Net, they’re attacks on machines on the ‘Net. Very few software systems, maybe none, are built in ways that sustain operation in spite of being continually rebuilt and continually growing.

Check out Kevin’s thoughts on making RSS easier.

Tim O’Reilly is sounding the alarm – CNet.com: O’Reilly: Stop throwing sheep, do something worthy:

“(These are) pretty depressing times in a lot of ways,” O’Reilly said in an address that first had looked like it would simply be a starry-eyed discussion of enterprise opportunities for Web 2.0. “And you have to conclude, if you look at the focus of a lot of what you call ‘Web 2.0,’ the relentless focus on advertising-based consumer models, lightweight applications, we may be living in somewhat of a bubble, and I’m not talking about an investment bubble. (It’s) a reality bubble.”

Lefsetz connects other media industries to the music industry – Lefsetz Letter: Denial:

Is this getting familiar yet? Does this sound like the record business?

What we’re going through in America replicates what happened in Japan in the 1990s. But rather than taking the bullet, eating the loss, the government continued to try to prop up the country’s financial system, to its detriment. It took almost a decade for it to revive. Every analyst says this was a mistake. They should have taken the hit immediately and started over.

The major labels refuse to believe we’re living in the twenty first century, they refuse to bite the bullet and get with the program, they want to continue to live in the glory days of the 1990’s. Isn’t that what Warner’s failed Estelle effort was about? Getting people to buy an overpriced CD to get the one good track? As they said in that old 1990’s TV show, homey don’t play that no more.

The labels have to confront reality, and bite the bullet now.

Dare explains why what bit Sarah Palin – a typical ‘forgot your password’ function – bit Sarah Palin – Dare Obasanjo: The Problem with Every Implementation of a “Forgot Your Password?” Feature I’ve Seen Online:

The fundamental flaw of pretty much every password recovery feature I’ve found online is that what they consider “secret” information actually isn’t thanks to social networking, blogs and even Wikipedia. Yahoo! Mail password recovery relies on asking you your date of birth, zip code and country of residence as a proof of identity. Considering that this is the kind of information that is on the average Facebook profile or MySpace page, it seems ludicrous that this is all that stops someone from stealing your identity online.

Lots of people scratched their heads at Google Chrome. Dare explains why Google would pursue it – Dare Obasanjo: The Significance of Google Chrome:

his boils down to the corporate ideology that “anything that is good for the Web is good for Google”. This means Google is in favor of anything that increases the breadth of the Web which explains why it is investing in O3b networks in an effort intended to bring the Web to 3 billion people in emerging markets. The more people there are using the Web, the more people there are viewing ads on Google’s services and on pages of sites that use AdSense and DoubleClick ads. This also means that Google is in favor of moving as much media consumption as possible to the Web. This explains why purchasing YouTube was so important.