Saturday, September 30, 2006
Google Meetings
Marissa Mayer, Google's vice-president of search products, has some great ideas for encouraging constant innovation and productive meetings: "In a shop like Google (GOOG), much of the work takes place in meetings, and her goal is to make sure teams have a firm mandate, strategic direction, and actionable information, while making participants feel motivated and respected. Mayer's six keys to running successful meetings follow..." BusinessWeek
Friday, September 29, 2006
Designed for Conflict
"Science fiction author, William Gibson once wrote that the target of terrorism was not the building being bombed or the individual being killed but the media. He argued that the purpose of an act of irregular warfare is to get media attention and that, in out media-saturated world, the media is not merely reporting on terrorism, but is the stage on which it is played out. To this end, Hezbollah has hired an advertising agency." /Digit/
Thursday, September 28, 2006
ThinkFree AJAX Edition
I love ThinkFree! The online version is really a major breakthrough that seems very simple. Here is the short description from DEMO.com: "ThinkFree AJAX Edition, a fast, light-weight tool for accessing, creating and editing office documents, enables users to maintain the best round-trip compatibility available with Microsoft Office, to easily create documents based on templates, to track changes from collaborators and to manage, view and roll back changes from previous versions." /DEMO.com/
DEMO
It looks like DEMO was a great event this year with lots of great presentations of cool, new tech products. You can "view past demonstrator presentations, company profiles, insightful keynotes and lively panel discussions from our previous events." /DEMO.com Video & Archives/
nanoLearning for Rapid eLearning
NanoLearning is a nifty site for rapidly creating shareable Flash-based e-learning modules. You don't need any html or Flash experience, just plug in content including text, images, other Flash content, etc. and you are off and running. /nanoLearning/
System One Wiki Software
System One is a interesting enterprise wiki on steriods that allows users to quickly create new content while auto-building a real-time search for related resources on the web, defined RSS feeds, company databases, etc. They have a quick screencast that gives you a taste for how it works.
Time Warner Chief Queries Internet Prices
"(Dick Parsons, chairman and chief executive officer of Time Warner) said the two most attractive assets available to increase web traffic were Facebook and YouTube. '[But] it's a tough assignment. Valuations that are put on those businesses that currently make no money are astronomical and you have to have a big leap of faith,' he said.
"Mr Parsons said the success of the MySpace acquisition (for $580m last year by News Corporation) was further increasing the appetite for deals by media companies. 'It [the MySpace deal] appears to have been a masterstroke,' he said." /MSNBC.com/
"Mr Parsons said the success of the MySpace acquisition (for $580m last year by News Corporation) was further increasing the appetite for deals by media companies. 'It [the MySpace deal] appears to have been a masterstroke,' he said." /MSNBC.com/
danah boyd on Social Networks
From Cory Doctorow: "danah boyd... gives an awesome, in depth talk on social networks and why people are using them. She touches on the history of social networks, how the online communities came into being, and some of the forces working on them today. There's no better speaker on social networks than danah boyd -- prepare to have your mind blown." /Boing Boing/
"A SOCIOLOGIST among geeks and a geek among sociologists, danah boyd has 278 friends who link her to 1.1 million others... A 25-year-old graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley (h)er irrepressible observations have made her a social-network guru for the programmers and venture capitalists who swarm around Friendster and its competitors.
"'She's definitely a Pied Piper for a bunch of different people,'' said Joichi Ito, a high-tech venture capitalist who lives in Tokyo. ''At the same time she, as an academic, is able to articulate what is going on in a way that the people building the tools rarely understand or can articulate.'
"Her academic supervisors are envious of her advantage. ''I look at cyberspace the way a deep-sea diver looks at the sea: through a glass plate,'' said Ms. Boyd's academic adviser, Peter Lyman, a professor at Berkeley's School of Information Management and Systems. ''She is out there swimming in it.''/New York Times/
"A SOCIOLOGIST among geeks and a geek among sociologists, danah boyd has 278 friends who link her to 1.1 million others... A 25-year-old graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley (h)er irrepressible observations have made her a social-network guru for the programmers and venture capitalists who swarm around Friendster and its competitors.
"'She's definitely a Pied Piper for a bunch of different people,'' said Joichi Ito, a high-tech venture capitalist who lives in Tokyo. ''At the same time she, as an academic, is able to articulate what is going on in a way that the people building the tools rarely understand or can articulate.'
"Her academic supervisors are envious of her advantage. ''I look at cyberspace the way a deep-sea diver looks at the sea: through a glass plate,'' said Ms. Boyd's academic adviser, Peter Lyman, a professor at Berkeley's School of Information Management and Systems. ''She is out there swimming in it.''/New York Times/
Wednesday, September 27, 2006
Spotback - Personal News
Spotback calls itself a "personal news service" and is unlike any other news aggregator I've tried: it's visually stunning, easy to use and finds RSS feeds based on keyword searches and interests rather than waiting for you to supply all the feeds yourself.
What if Bionics Were Better?
"Garner is part of a tiny population of early adopters eager to test bionics by choice rather than out of need. Any company that comes out with, say, a bio implant for Wi-Fi connectivity or devices that interact directly with the brain, can put Garner on the waiting list, she said.
"Such desire for radical body transformation remains very much on the fringe, and represents behavior that many if not most people would consider taboo. But the distance between denial and acceptance could turn as much on what current machines can and can't do, as it does body image." /Wired News/
"Such desire for radical body transformation remains very much on the fringe, and represents behavior that many if not most people would consider taboo. But the distance between denial and acceptance could turn as much on what current machines can and can't do, as it does body image." /Wired News/
CinemaNow, Universal Sign Pact on Movie Downloads, DVD burning
"The online movie download market may have gotten a bit more interesting today. Universal Pictures and CinemaNow announced that 'The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift' will be available for download and burning to DVD on the same day as the DVD is released in stores. For $9.99, consumers will be able to download the movie and burn a DVD complete with menus and bonus features." /arstechnica/
Saturday, September 23, 2006
Six Degrees of Spam
Wow! According to orkut, I am now "connected to 28,471,067 people through 188 friends." Too bad it seems that 28,470,867 of them are either spambots or people posing as spambots.
Social Network Theory
Social Network Theory (SNT): "(Y)ou can make up your own network diagrams that tell interesting stories of communication, isolation, rivalry and power. SNT is yet another example of an application of mathematical reasoning which is not restricted to simply manipulating numbers or geometric relationships. Rather, it is a creative combination of these and other elements to illuminate hidden relationships around us. For more on SNT, search the web. Here is a good starting site: How to do Social Network Analysis." /numb3rs blog
Patternhunting Patternhunting
I did a little ego-surfing today using Blogger's BlogSearch Beta to see if anyone else is posting on "patternhunter" topics. Here are a few interesting things I found:
- A wonderfully complementary post by Lee Konstantinou: "If, like me, you have an obsession with really sophisticated science fiction and emerging techno-cultural patterns of change, this site is something like an endless feast of fun."
- A post by Jason B. Jones of Central Connecticut State University re: his Modern British Poetry class: "This is the 'Patternhunter' website I showed today; here's the link to 'nodal points.'"
- Metaphorge, the Archbishop of Balogna even created a special RSS feed
New Term: Video Grammar
"A new feature at the Web 2 conference this year will be 'Shorts' - I'll be showing off videos that are emblematic of where our culture's video grammar seems to be headed." /John Battelle's Searchblog/
Brain Stimulation Creates Shadow Person
"Swiss scientists say they've found electrical stimulation of the brain can create the sensation of a 'shadow person' mimicking one's bodily movements...
"The finding could be a step towards understanding psychiatric affects such as feelings of paranoia, persecution and alien control, say neuroscientists." /physorg.com/
"The finding could be a step towards understanding psychiatric affects such as feelings of paranoia, persecution and alien control, say neuroscientists." /physorg.com/
Bruce Sterling: I Saw The Best Minds of my Generation Destroyed By Google
Bruce Sterling: "That creepy 'differential permissioning' sure saves a lot of trouble for grown-ups. Increasing chunks of the world are just... magically off limits. It's a weird new regime where every mall and every school and every bus and train and jet is tagged and tracked and ambient and pervasive and ubiquitous and geolocative... Jesus, I love those words... Where was I?
"Right. We teenagers have to live in 'controlled spaces'. Radio-frequency ID tags, real-time locative systems, global positioning systems, smart doorways, security videocams. They 'protect' us kids, from imaginary satanic drug dealer terrorist mafia predators. We're 'secured'. We're juvenile delinquents with always-on cellphone nannies in our pockets. There's no way to turn them off. The internet was designed without an off-switch." /New Scientist Tech/
"Right. We teenagers have to live in 'controlled spaces'. Radio-frequency ID tags, real-time locative systems, global positioning systems, smart doorways, security videocams. They 'protect' us kids, from imaginary satanic drug dealer terrorist mafia predators. We're 'secured'. We're juvenile delinquents with always-on cellphone nannies in our pockets. There's no way to turn them off. The internet was designed without an off-switch." /New Scientist Tech/
IBM's 'Secret Island' in SecondLife
"IBM has decided to use the capabilities already developed by Linden Labs for its Second Life gaming environment to build a separate, experimental area within it. Participants – from IBM research and development departments around the world – can contribute whatever they feel is important to create a productive environment in which to conduct and manage 'business'.
"As with Second Life, participants create an online 'avatar' to represent them... (W)hen a meeting is called, the participants' avatars appear in a Second Life, 25MByte, online container that appears on each of their PCs.
"Communications can be by key-entry text or VoIP if that is appropriate. With text, all the contributions can be easily and fully minuted, and the probability is that speech-to-text systems will allow the same for speech-based interactions in the near future...
"The team itself is contributing gadgets to Second Life, including a language translator system. This has been provided free to Second Life mentors and is available for sale on the system. It has also developed a portal to an external business system – in this case Amazon – which can then be used by all participants." /The Register/
Thanks to Michel Leblanc for these cool screenshots of the IBM virtual facility.
For a excellent summary of how other businesses and groups are exploring SecondLife, check out this article from Popular Science.
"As with Second Life, participants create an online 'avatar' to represent them... (W)hen a meeting is called, the participants' avatars appear in a Second Life, 25MByte, online container that appears on each of their PCs.
"Communications can be by key-entry text or VoIP if that is appropriate. With text, all the contributions can be easily and fully minuted, and the probability is that speech-to-text systems will allow the same for speech-based interactions in the near future...
"The team itself is contributing gadgets to Second Life, including a language translator system. This has been provided free to Second Life mentors and is available for sale on the system. It has also developed a portal to an external business system – in this case Amazon – which can then be used by all participants." /The Register/
Thanks to Michel Leblanc for these cool screenshots of the IBM virtual facility.
For a excellent summary of how other businesses and groups are exploring SecondLife, check out this article from Popular Science.
Friday, September 22, 2006
Cool-Hunting on the Web
"Australian publisher Bill Tikos is currently working on a television series featuring five cool-hunters who travel the planet looking for the latest thing,' he says. 'Australian director Peter Weir is working on a big-screen adaptation of William Gibson's novel Pattern Recognition, which tells the story of a New York cool-hunter in the post-September 11 world." /smh.com.au/
Monday, September 18, 2006
The Problem of Expertise
"Experts are social facts — society typically recognizes experts through some process of credentialling, such as the granting of degrees, professional certifications, or institutional engagement. We have a sense of what it means that someone is a doctor, a judge, an architect, or a priest, but these facts are only facts because we agree they are." Many-to-Many/
YouTube Guitar God Found
"South Korean student Lim Jeong-hyun has basked in five minutes and 20 seconds of fame nearly 9 million times over. Lim, 22, was identified by the New York Times about two weeks ago as the mysterious man bathed in sunlight who played guitar in one of the most-watched videos of all time on the popular video sharing YouTube.com Web site." /Yahoo! News/
Warner Music Coming to YouTube
"Warner Music Group has inked an unprecedented deal with the Internet upstart (YouTube). In return for a slice of advertising revenues, Warner will allow YouTube to host its entire music video back catalogue and—even more unusual—user-created videos can use Warner songs in their soundtracks." /arstechnica/
Sunday, September 17, 2006
2.5 TB Hard Drives for 2009
"Seagate today provided an updated outlook on the future of the hard drive. The company nearly tripled today's highest storage density and believes that 275 GB capacities will be realistic for future iPods, while desktop computers will be able to store up to 2.5 TB on one drive." / TG Daily/
Saturday, September 16, 2006
Social Interactions in Online Virtual Environments
"With thousands of people using Second Life at any one time, Nick Yee and colleagues at Stanford University realised it presented a chance to assess whether users interacted in similar ways to people in the real world. After using a computer program to monitor the behaviour of over 1,600 avatars in one-on-one interactions, they conclude that the answer is 'yes'." /Smart Mobs/
World of Warcraft: Is It a Game?
Steven Levy: "In the physical world we vainly scrounge for glory. Bin Laden still taunts us, the bus doors close before we reach them and leave us standing in the rain. But in the fantasy realm of Azeroth, the virtual geography of World of Warcraft, the physical pain comes only from hitting a keyboard too hard, camaraderie is the norm and heroism is never far away. In simple terms, Warcraft is the most advanced and popular entry in a genre called Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games, or MMO. 'I call it the Technicolor, Americanized version of 'Lord of the Rings',' says Chris Metzen, VP of creative development for the game's maker, Blizzard Software. But for millions it is more than a game—it's an escape, an obsession and a home." /Newsweek Technology/
Douglas Adams's 1990 BBC doc on hypertext
"In this one-hour documentary produced by the BBC in 1990, Douglas Adams falls asleep in front of a television and dreams about future time when he may be allowed to play a more active role in the information he chooses to digest." /Boing Boing/
Go2Web2.0
Go2Web20.net - The complete Web 2.0 directory. has a cool Flash website listing all the major Web2.0 companies.
Tuesday, September 12, 2006
Apophenia
William Gibson’s 2003 Pattern Recognition is set in a post 9/11 New York. It plays with the idea that humans need to make sense of randomness, to build meaningful connections out of apparently disconnected events—all the more so in the aftermath of a tragedy. And Gibson understood how surreal watching the destruction of the Towers is: “It will be like watching one of her own dreams on television. Some vast and deeply personal insult to any ordinary notion of interiority. An experience outside of culture.” /Business Standard/
Sunday, September 10, 2006
Joi Ito: The Ambassador from the Next Economy
Here is a great new article on internet pioneer, VC, activist and advisor to pundits Joi Ito: The Ambassador from the Next Economy: "Spending countless hours in imaginary warfare may be simply a diversion for many people, but Mr. Ito insists that World of Warcraft is nothing less than an emerging model for organizational design. Given his track record as a venture capitalist and a catalyst for computer-based socially oriented innovation, powerful decision makers are paying attention." /strategy+business/
Saturday, September 09, 2006
Digg as a Game
"Digg is the online version of The Urn Game. What I see are power users, typically the first movers, wherein a vote is casted by one of the top diggers, and then a flood of comformity follows — that is, voters follow the first movers, typically the power users, and ignore their own rational feelings about the article being dugg and vote anyway, following the power user’s vote. At a wholesale level, this creates an information cascade, such that the Nth vote conveys no more information than the first 2 votes... Digg is a system that allows the power users to swing the behavior of an entire group." /shmula/
Web2.0: Free Of The Desktop?
My Thinkpad died after apparently one too many Linux distro installations (I was adding a new one about every other day for a while). As a long-time Mac user in a Windows world, adding another OS to the mix made sharing files an often frustrating experience. With much more emphasis on compatible formats, moving from Mac to Windows to Linux and back again is relatively painless these days. And yet, maybe the real promise of Web2.0 is to make the OS irrelevant.
Cory Doctorow describes himself as "someone who lives in his browser." I would put myself in that category as well and have been messing around with the idea of creating my own application service provider ever since I first heard that term back in the 90s. I love the idea of using any cpu as a terminal on the net where all my data and applications are stored.
Here are a few of the apps that are making this more possible all the time:
With web-based applications and data storage that enable us to work and play beyond the desktop, could the "OS wars," and maybe the OS itself, soon be a thing of the past?
- sean
Cory Doctorow describes himself as "someone who lives in his browser." I would put myself in that category as well and have been messing around with the idea of creating my own application service provider ever since I first heard that term back in the 90s. I love the idea of using any cpu as a terminal on the net where all my data and applications are stored.
Here are a few of the apps that are making this more possible all the time:
- gmail - now with nearly 3GB of storage, my current storage of over 1000 messages is only using 12% of capacity. At the rate that the service continues to upgrade capacity, I may never come even close to tapping out this service. Of course, Google may be running algorithms on all of us that will soon create a Minority Report world where we are bombarded with highly customized ad-sense commercials everytime our rfid-embedded brains pass a location-aware plasma screen.
- google calendar - with nice integration with gmail and the ical standard, this is a shareable and syncable web calendar that seems to get the job done for now and is sure to improve over time.
- del.icio.us - still the best social bookmarking / tagging service for my money (as in none since it's free)
- thinkfree online - this is a seriously cool product that I just started playing with over the past couple weeks. Despite the slower start time, this nifty little web app kicks Writely's ass by allowing you to create, share and store (up to 1GB for now) MS Office compatable docs, spreadsheets and presentations all using a relatively intuitive interface that duplicates the look and feel of ThinkFree's destop product (which is very similar to its Office counterpart). It even has wiki-type versioning history and allows you to post to a remote blog too.
- openomy is one of a bunch or new data storage services on the web these days. Openomy is written in Rails gives you a nice interface and 1GM of free storage.
- bloglines is still my favorite web-based RSS reader. It is incredibly easy to use and is one of the first things that I open when I am traveling or just have a quick minute to check in with what is going on in the world (or at least the world that I am interested in)
- So this sound great for common productivity tools but web-based apps will never replace apps like iTunes to play the music you have, right? Actually, Pandora, BlogMusik and similar apps to come might be even better to help you explore music you don't have (and both are free, at least for now)
- E-Messenger and KoolIM are a cool web-based instant messengers that allows you to IM with AIM, MSN, and Yahoo (including Yahoo Beta) without dowloading any client software.
With web-based applications and data storage that enable us to work and play beyond the desktop, could the "OS wars," and maybe the OS itself, soon be a thing of the past?
- sean
Friday, September 08, 2006
Spore and Player Creativity
Will Wright's soon-to-be-released new game Spore is "going to be a “massively single-player” game, where the universe in which you play is inhabited by the creations of other players — from the level of primitive creatures to the level of technologically-advanced planetary civilizations.... Spore will be a good environment for player creativity... “(V)olunteer” Robin Williams... started using the creature authoring tool and ad-libbing at the same time. Squashing and stretching the spine and the body, adding and subtracting limbs and sense organs and decorations, he kept the audience laughing through a high-speed series of references to pilates, Freud, GMO chickens, anorexia, Paris Hilton, Al Jolson, and so on. He extended the spine so it could kiss its own ass, added three sets of arms, and said, “A creature that makes Darwin say, ‘Hey, I’m not taking acid ever again.’'"/Grand Text Auto/
Selfish Teenager Brains?
"A new scientific study suggests that teenagers use a different part of their brains than adults to make decisions, resulting in a kind of selfishness. University College London neuroscientist Sarah-Jayne Blakemore asked people of various ages decision-making questions and questions about the well-being of others. In teenagers, the superior temporal sulcus lit up. In adults, the prefontal cortex was more active." /Boing Boing/
Thursday, September 07, 2006
Hyperscope
The HyperScope is a high-performance thought processor that enables you to navigate, view, and link to documents in sophisticated ways. It's the brainchild of Doug Engelbart, the inventor of hypertext and the mouse, and is the first step towards his larger vision for an Open Hyperdocument System." /Hyperscope.org/
Saturday, September 02, 2006
William Gibson's Japan
William Gibson on Japan: "I'm interested in it because of the exquisite, weird complexity of their culture and the sort of mutant quality that it has... There is something about the culture that enables them to import and incorporate things from other places, yet remain very much who they are." /canada.com/
Free Help Setting up Your Router or Firewall
"Many Internet users are not aware of how to configure their router or firewall in order to use applications like Peer-to-Peer file sharing (PtoP), Internet Games, Web serving, FTP serving, WebCams, IRC DDC, and Instant Messaging such as AIM, ICQ, Yahoo and MS Messenger. Our Routers section offers detailed walkthroughs on how to setup port forwarding. These how to guides make it easy to setup your router or firewall for any application you may need." /PortForward/
Technology Spices Up Learning for Net Generation
"(The Net Generation) expect their education information to be delivered in technologically savvy ways... Today's students want to be quickly immersed in information from multiple media -- not the 'controlled release' of a traditional lecture... Whether it's having wheels on a desk chair so they can move to another table during group work or using an iPod to review a section of the science lesson, students want their education to be portable" /Technology News/
Patternhunting "Inappropriate Behavior"
"National ICT Australia (NICTA) scientists are developing advanced surveillance technologies including software algorithms to track "inappropriate behavior" in public places.The project—which aims to prevent, detect and predict acts of terrorism—is partly funded by a 634,000 Australian dollars (US$485,000) grant from the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet.Dubbed the Smart Applications for Emergencies (SAFE) project, the team has already developed a proposed specification for a Tsunami-type warning language used to characterize and disseminate threat levels." /CIO Tech Informer/
