OPINION
New XWEBS Browser Kicks Up XTALK
15-01-2003
by Bernie Goldbach
When 16-year old Adnan Osmani won the top award for the 2003 Esat BT Young Scientists Exhibition, he could not have imagined the worldwide public cross-talk generated by reports of his work.
A credible team of judges at the Esat BT Young Scientists Exhibition carefully reviewed the new Internet browser displayed by Adnan Osmani before declaring it "best of show." What followed during the next five days revealed interesting facts about how cross-talk spawns on the Internet. Because immediately after the original news story appeared on-line in The Irish Times and as a sound file from a Pat Kenny interview, several prominent discussion sites began commenting on the winning work.
Ralph Averbuch from ElectricNews talked with Osmani in front of his exhibition. "It looked like a browser designed to look like an XBox -- all luminous green buttons and metallic shading," said Fergal Byrne of Adnet. "I went into enough detail with the chap to establish the speedup must involve proxy servers, maybe an alternative streaming protocol, and maybe a rescheduling of the bits to download."
Unfortunately, the original reports from Ireland on a quiet Saturday headlined Osmani's work as "a new browser that downloads content from the Internet six times faster." This headline caught the eyes of thousands of techies across the world and the skeptics roared.
"Is this the same Irish bloke who invented the pedal-powered wheelchair?" asked a commentator on the satirical Fark site.
Several programmers observed that if Osmani's claim to writing 1.5 million lines of code during a year is believed, he would have to generate nearly 2000 lines of code a day. "I'd be very surprised if he wrote the whole thing from scratch," said Byrne.
"Even professional hackers peak between 10 and 12 lines of code an hour, 100 lines of code per day (sustained over the course of the project)," said Kevin Greene in Limerick.
"But you're forgetting one very important fact," said John Dunne in Cahir, County Tipperary. "This kid didn't have to go to any meetings."
Is Osmani's project truly innovative? That's hard to say because nothing exists on Google to explain the program and the Young Scientists Exhibition Web site has no samples of any student work for download. In his discussions with a reviewer from Media Lab Europe, Osmani understood Internet protocols from the perspective of a second level student. He did not have a comprehensive grasp of communications engineering that one would expect of a programmer who wrote a breakthrough browser. That's the community opinion on the anarchistic slashdot.org Web site, in five pages of threads on boards.ie and in the Webmaster world as well.
"So, this is the fifth sign of the Apocalypse where Ireland rules the world of programming achievements," wrote Ray Tighe on Slashdot. "Long live the red-headed programmers!"
"Hand-in-hand with public discussion comes (irreverent) comments and other dysfunctions that progressively decrease the signal-to-noise ratio of any topic," said Ray Ozzie, developer of Lotus Notes and Groove.
Karlin Lillington waded into the middle of the sniping comments by posting information in her blog from Irish Times Science Editor Dick Ahlstrom. Lillington explained how Osmani assembled a piece of software that improves browsing performance on several high-traffic Web sites. Dave Winer, the world's most prominent weblogger, cited Lillington in his daily column at Scripting.com. That alone brought nearly 2000 viewers to the story on the day.
Ahlstrom said that the judges were concerned that the browser might appear to be doing what it was, in truth, not doing, so they brought in three additional judges from senior technology positions to evaluate it. In addition they sent it the University College Dublin's computer science department, where researchers there put it through its paces, running it continuously for two days. It did exactly what Osmani said it could do, flawlessly. The UCD people told Ahlstrom they would have been able to examine it at code level.
This kind of programming work could bring fame to Osmani, if he donated his technology to an Open Source browser project.
Ahlstrom warned Osmani that he would get intense media scrutiny. Based on activity recorded by the XML storage system behind major news sites, interest in the XWEBS browser grew from slightly more than 1,000 queries when Osmani won his award to nearly 6,000 queries a day four days later. And all this interest occurred before Google included Osmani in its search engine database.
This pre-Google profile emerged inside the news aggregators. Technologies like BlogChannels gave loosely joined webloggers a metadata way of developing the story about Osmani.
"The webloggers annotated their ideas in specific ways, using permalinks, referrers and pingbacks," said Tim Kirby, an Irish blogger in Dublin's Xi Creative. This kind of public discussion used a far different architectural design pattern than on an electronic discussion site. People responded in their own blogs, hyperlinking back to the topic's permalink. In discussing Osmani's work, dozens of authors spread out their thoughts all over the Web. They were immediately discoverable through electronic news aggregators.
"Personally, I don't know how kids so young deal with the voracious public appetite for every detail about them, as well as all the criticism and scrutiny," said Lillington. "Basically they're just doing something they really like and not deliberately searching for a huge profile."
While Osmani's project may not rewrite browser history, he has finished a meritorious project for a school that attracted the attention of a global audience. He deserves better than begrudgery.
Caped Koala Studios has built a virtual world for kids, combining education and social networking 