This dense book took me forever to read in bits and bites on the subway and during lunch. Covers too much ground to summarize here, perhaps after a re-read.
iStorm is Hydra with integrated drawing and chat. trying it out now
Really personalized advertising
Greg Elin had the best idea at the LazyWeb as Competitive Sport BOF last night. He wants a way to dump calendar items, tasks, and the like out of his calendaring system (iCal, Outlook, etc.) and have those items display as ads on the web sites that he visits. So, when he goes to Slashdot, a banner ad tells him to stop for orange juice on the way home. When he goes to news.com, there's an ad telling him that his mother's birthday is coming up.
In a later conversation, Matt Haughey outlined a proof-of-concept approach to the problem. He'd use Mozilla to override the stylesheet, strip out the current ads, and plug in his own ads, which would be created by pulling them out of iCal and using a Perl or PHP graphics program in conjunction with a local web server to serve them on the fly.
Greg said he would be willing to pay a small amount for this service, and I bet quite a few other people would as well.
Martin Buber. "Play is the exultation of the possible"
The emperor has new clothes
The current buzz around social software reminds me of the excitement around web services last year. Another similarity: both are new names for old practices. Web services have been around for almost as long as the web, and social software has been around for awhile as well. The new monikers allow people to talk about old concepts as if they were new, a useful practice in breaking old bad habits...as long as we don't forget the past too much. (A la Alan Kay's presentation this morning, particularly Douglas Englebart's demonstration of the mouse and video-collaboration.)
Our fearless leader
Rael Dornfest, cult leader and cloner, is not a man to be crossed. I saw him just now, pounding on some hapless nerd near the coffee pots after the guy suggested that Clay is our new leader. You'd think an ambassador to aliens from the other side of the galaxy would be a little more relaxed.
Alan Kay on scalable group collaboration (Open Croquet)
Alan Kay showed us a pre-alpha demo of some software (called Open Croquet, I think) written in Smalltalk and Squeak. The collective collaboration of Hydra + Star Trek's Holodeck + The Matrix. It looks like what he's done is create an OS based not on applications but on objects, which makes a bit of emergence possible (which, if you're drinking the Kool-Aid here at Etech, is a good thing). Quite impressive.
David Reed is the / in TCP/IP. - Alan Kay
Thursday happenings @ Etech
Looking ahead to what's on tap for today at Etech, there's Alan Kay -- inventor of the Smalltalk programming language -- talking about why the computer revolution hasn't happened yet, Macromedia's Kevin Lynch on personal interfaces, the all-powerful Clay Shirky (all hail Clay, for he is our God!) talks about the group getting in its own way in social software, Coates on UpMyStreet, Gillmor on Journalism 3.0, warblogging, Meg on weblogs and a little RSS controversy, Kapor on Chandler, Data Mining Social Cyberspaces, Mr. Stewart Butterfield on how games and social software are the same ass thing (well, maybe not exactly), nanotech, and social software in school reform. Whew!
Not to mention the BOFs: user experience and etech, a LazyWeb free-for-all, and web geoblogging. If your brain is not full by the end of the day, you're not trying hard enough.
The finest in geek humor
Scene: The Open Source Cafe.
Man: Waiter, there's a fly in my soup.
Waiter: Sir, it's not a bug, it's a feature.
Conferences are great for dorky jokes that no one should ever utter and under no circumstances should post to their weblog.
My Trip to Liberty City. awesome narrated video of someone navigating the virtual world of Grand Theft Auto as a tourist
Internet Bookmobile at Etech
Brewster Kahle is currently speaking about the Internet Bookmobile. It'll be downstairs after the session and you can get your own book printed. Donations for the continued operation of the Bookmobile are appreciated.
Update: My photos of the Bookmobile. (Journalists and others: feel free to use the photos with attribution. Thanks!)
Starving the ants
During his talk on Biological Computing, Eric Bonabeau mentioned that to run experiments with ants, they need to starve them to get them to do anything. There's a push to starve the ants, as it were, with the DMCA, the Broadcast Flag, Patriot II, plugging the analog hole and the like. At some point, this is going to result in some pretty hungry ants. What happens then?
Maceij's semantic blog search engine. uses 1-year old data but it works
Bottom up conference
You can tell this conference is bottom up rather than top down when digerati Esther Dyson and Howard Rheingold are sitting on the floor in the packed O'Reilly presentation. Could you imagine Alan Greenspan sitting on the floor of some financial conference?
Realtime Amazon product feeds. Perl script
Tech Forum Talkes Big Ideas. Wired News
Collective note-taking with Hydra
Hydra lets people work on documents together via Rendezvous. Right now, 5-7 people are taking collaborative notes in the same document on Eric Bonabeau's talk on Biological Computing. With the permission of the other participants, I'll either post or link to the resulting document here. (Ok, here are the notes we (there were 7-10 of us) took during the session. Oh, and here it is with Hydra's color coding intact.)
Update: there's now a chat as well...using Hydra as a ad hoc chat system. Hydra just connects with a place for people to plop in text. Very little imposed heirarchy which makes it very flexible (what Howard was talking about this morning in urging developers to "create tools that amplify collective action").
Some screenshots of New Blogger. is it ok to be underwhelmed by this?
Howard Rheingold on software and action
Some key points from Howard Rheingold's keynote on Technology Innovation and Collective Action:
- Developers: create tools that amplify collective action
- Are we going to be consumers (passive) or users (active)?
- We need to fight to remain users.
- Reputation systems are crucial.
- In building software, learn from the past and buildin room for future innovators
- The design of defaults is important. (The idea that simple is very usable, but make it hackable for power users and developers.)
SixApart is taking it to Blogger. Hammersley @ Guardian UK
Announcing TypePad
Ben, Mena, and Anil announce TypePad:
TypePad is an upcoming hosted service providing powerful tools for creating full-featured weblogs. Built in response to the needs of webloggers, online diarists and writers, TypePad harnesses the power of Six Apart's popular Movable Type personal publishing system into a turnkey service, suitable for beginners and experts alike.
Think of it with Blog*Spot, except with MT handling the content management bit. Drooooool....
Piracy is Progressive Taxation and Other Thoughts on the Evolution of Online Distribution. by Tim O'Reilly
Acting locally
I'm here at Etech and I'm experimenting with an event-oriented weblog. Participants at the conference using the WiFi network who visit www.kottke.org/index.html will get a special Etech page. The Etech page has quick conference links at the top, my current status so that people can find me if they wish, a little more space in the sidebar for the remaindered links, as well as some aesthetic tweaks. Folks not at the conference will still get the normal front page and can view the Etech page here. Now, how do I encorporate Confab into the mix?
Confab by Ludicorp
Building on one of last year's conference darlings, Danny O'Brien's Panopticion, Ludicorp is demoing Confab. Taking advantage of the formation of the transient geographic group interacting in both real and virtual spaces here at Etech,
Confab is an ad-hoc conversation space mapped to the conference facility's floorplan which allows you to discuss and debate sessions live with other attendees, make contacts, send instant messages and create conversations to plan group meetings and activities.
A crude Matrix, if you will, for finding friends, not enslaving humanity to harvest their energy**.
** Although if you're an introvert like myself, that's what extroverts do...suck all the energy out of us for their own evil purposes.
Hardware hacking with Bunnie Huang, X-box hacker. Etech notes by Cory
Punditry cubed
There's a panel about warblogging at Etech...featuring exactly zero actual warbloggers. Weblog pundits talking about warblog pundits talking about media pundits talking about the war? I'm getting dizzy...
No Man's Land
No Man's Land (metacritic) is a French film about the Bosnian War. Slight correction: it's a comedy about the Bosnian War. The film reminded me a bit of Dr. Strangelove with the simultaneously serious & lighthearted treatments of a weighty subject. There was even a homage or two to Kubrick's masterpiece. Highly recommended.
How to get the most out of conferences
Scott Berkun says that conferences are what you make of them:
I've seen many folks take conferences way too seriously. I find that I learn much better if I'm having fun, and enjoying the people I'm with. I can't do that if I'm fixated on getting to every session on time, or not staying out too late, or trying to achieve any specific objective. If I'm relaxed and enjoying my time away from the office, I'm more open to new ideas and approaches for what to do when I get back. I believe strongly that this is the primary reason my employer is sending me: to learn. Therefore, it's my job to figure out what kind of environment and state of mind I need to be in to best facilitate that objective.
No Man's Land
No Man's Land is a French film about the Bosnian War. Slight correction: it's a comedy about the Bosnian War. The film reminded me a bit of Dr. Strangelove with the simultaneously serious & lighthearted treatments of a weighty subject. There was even a homage or two to Kubrick's masterpiece. Highly recommended.
Google's search results peg out at ~1000. When did this happen?
Portal Wars II: When Search Engines Attack
I love the current escalation in the battle of the search engines. Since Google came out of nowhere a few years ago and ate all the other search engines for lunch, the response from that camp has been less than impressive. With their recent efforts, Yahoo! and Ask Jeeves have finally figured out what it is that makes Google so successful (and Microsoft wants to take a stab at it too).
It's the user experience, stupid.
Advances on the internet and the web are typically heralded as technology-driven. Robert Morris from IBM argued last year at Etech 2002 that -- and I'm paraphrasing from memory here -- most significant advances in software are actually advances in user experience, not in technology. Mosaic was not an advancement in technology over TBL's original browser. Blogger is a highly-specialized FTP client. IM is IRC++ (or IRC for Dummies, depending on your POV). The advantages that these applications offered people were user experience-oriented, not technology-oriented.
Google's success in the search space due to their focus on user experience has lent significant credibility to this way of thinking, so much so that their competitors are now scrambling to catch up on those terms. As someone who deals with user experience professionally, it's great to see this happening.
Musicbot 2003, Avril Lavigne
Along the lines of Dave Eggers' great rant about selling out, Jim Derogatis compares manufactured pop star Avril Lavigne with her less "phony" colleagues:
Midway through a sold-out show at the UIC Pavilion Saturday night, Avril Lavigne played a spirited cover of Green Day's "Basketcase."
A comparison between the two pop-punk acts is revealing.
According to the standards employed in the punk-rock underground and adopted by many critics, one of these acts is "real" and one is "phony." But while the differences are interesting to note, in the end they don't matter a bit.
The show that Lavigne performed here on her first wide-scale tour was as musically accomplished, emotionally rousing and satisfying overall as any I've seen by Green Day, Blink-182, Sum 41 or any of their "more authentic" pop-punk peers.
Moo, off to Etech, moo
I'm off to SF for O'Reilly Emerging Tech Conference on Tuesday. I'm going against the grain this year by taking my iBook along, "blogging" in "realtime", and taking digital photos of people. If there's a box, I am out of it. If you're attending as well, stop by and say hello...I'll be the guy with the iBook and digital camera.
Enigmo and more addicting games
Can't write. Playing Enigmo. If you ever want to step outside again, don't download this game. I went to bed last night with little water droplets cascading behind my eyelids. It's only available for OS X, and it's a variation of The Incredible Machine (basically the game version of this Honda commercial). I gotta go...sweet Lady E is calling my name....
(And, as usual, there's always Collapse, Snood, mini-golf, and Bejeweled.)
MrWong's Soup'Partments. best thing I've seen all week
A night at the opera
Meg and I went to see La Traviata last night at the Metropolitan Opera House. It was a lot of fun. The music, singing, sets, and costumes were amazing...and people actually yell "Bravo!" while cheering.
The Opera House itself, however, leaves a lot to be desired. It was built in the 60s as part of Lincoln Center, a center for the arts that pillaged other parts of the city of their arts venues and plopped them all in a massive complex on the Upper West Side. What were architects and interior designers thinking back in the 60s? Everything is fine when the house lights are down and the stage is alive with color and song, but as soon as the lights go on, I feel as though I'm sitting in the opera house equivalent of a 60s suburban living room. No sense of grandeur, no awe, just a design that didn't age well at all and a big spiky chandelier that looks like the spaceship that Jor-El stuffed Superman into just before Krypton exploded.