|
|
 7 Jul 2004 @ 16:50, by ming. Technology
Inspired by the experience at Blogtalk, in part with the 'backchannel' interaction, I can't help but brainstorm a bit on how better tools and organizing can make it better.
First I must mention that there's of course not any panacea in all this computer use that is going on in a setting like that. No guarantee that it is all useful. I'd really much rather have some really good dialogues and small group discussion, without any particular need for computers. But no matter what goes on, there are certainly ways it can be made more rich through the information infrastructure that supports it.
Somebody mentioned that at the previous conference it was new to have WiFi networking and that kind of thing, so it wasn't really used as intensively. But here people really used a bunch of tools that way, in a more active manner. Which means that it is a key part of the conference itself, and should really more formally be made part of the process. I.e. not just try to provide an open connection and leave it at that. But also establish the necessary feedback loops.
The presenters felt a little left out, as they couldn't see what people were chatting about while they were speaking. And the people who didn't bring a laptop felt left out. Or the ones who hadn't discovered the wiki and the IRC channel. Or those who didn't know how to get on IRC. Or those who didn't have Macs so they were missing a couple of the tools used, Rendezvous and SubEthaEdit. So therefore various people got various parts of it, but maybe not all they wanted. OK, the collaborative tools like the wiki are meant for tying the strings together, and people can now go and see notes, and can read other people's postings, to see what they might have missed, etc. But should it maybe be more formally organized? Like a designated note organizer, and somebody who archives the chat transcripts. Somebody who makes links on the big screen available in clickable form in one of the side channels. Somebody who gets questions from those channels back to the presenters.
Anu Gupta has some good comments on some of these things.
Another subject. Despite a number of supporting ways of knowing participants, like them having listed their names and blogs in a wiki page, it can still be difficult to keep track of who people are. It would be useful if there were a uniform list with profiles. Little pictures of each person, liking to a profile with who they are and their blogs, etc. The information is mostly there, but it is scattered in various places. Like, even if I have a link to somebody's blog, it might or might not tell me quickly who they are. I might have to browse around for a while, which takes attention away from other things. I've done events where we took a picture of everybody at the entrance, if they didn't already have a participant profile, and the list of people was made available, and could be checked afterwards. I learned that from Sergio Lub of Friendly Favors and it can work very well.
Presenters put up slides on a big screen. I'd quite likely want to click on their links, but I'd have to type them in first, and the slide has probably changed before I get them all. They could be provided in a side channel, for example by somebody who had the job of typing in all the links as they happen. Or, better yet, the slides on the screen are presented in real-time by a feed, so that I can both click on it, and keep it, instead of trying to frantically re-type it. OK, I don't know how likely it is that one can export PowerPoint to a feed, but it is an idea.
The idea applies quite well here that everything should be a feed, and everything should be aggregatable. There could be one overall feed that shows everything that is happening. Who's speaking, what are they showing on the screen, updates to wiki or to notes, new blog postings from participants, new profile information about participants, etc. Instead of having to jump around and refresh pages, looking for things that are changed.
Self-organization can be fun and useful, but can also be messy and distracting and waste a lot of energy on duplicating efforts and trying to find out what is going on. The experiences acquired can well point out what emerges as being useful, and those things could well be phased into a more organized and stable form. More >
|
|
|
|
 5 Jul 2004 @ 17:29, by ming. Technology
Now, those of you don't go to tech conferences, or who haven't recently, might not be aware of how it works nowadays. In a conference that has a significant number of bloggers present it would now be completely unheard of if there weren't an open WiFi network in the conference room. Which means, essentially, you open your laptop and you're on the net. Which means that about one out of two people there has a laptop running. The lucky people who manage to grab a seat at the two rows of tables at the front can actually sit at a desk and are most likely to be able to plug in. And now, this is suddenly a different kind of audience. They look up people's URLs right away, they browse the scheduled program, reference materials, check the validity of what people are saying, and share maps for the suggested lunch locatioin. There's a wiki with information about participants, which anybody can update. There's an IRC chat channel, so one can talk to each other, both people who're there, and those who watch the live feed at home. People on macs (more than 1/2) automatically see other people there on iChat, and can collaborate on writing notes in SubEthaEdit. If people are bored with the presentation, they check their e-mail or browse the web for totally unrelated things. A bunch of people blog live right there. I.e. they write about what they hear, and have often posted about a talk before it even is done. Based on the trackback mechanism, others can see which weblog postings have happened that refer to the conference, right away, and will most likely have read it shortly after it appears.
Is that all useful? In many ways it is. It provides more channels of information, and makes what otherwise would be a one-way speech into something more interactive. You can discuss amongst yourselves, voice your opinion, your disagreements, provide contrasting information, etc. You can also miss half of the talk, of course, but somehow you're likely to get it back from other channels.
It doesn't always work. The net connection was obviously rather overloaded here half the time. And people now take it so for granted that any problems tend to be met with a lot of comments and postings about the outrage of providing only a spotty connection.
Anyway, those of you who go to these things know all this of course, so this was more for the benefit of those who might consider such a format strange and unexpected.
More from another angle from another participant, Suw Charman, here.
Wien in general has excellent public connectivity. There are a large number of open WiFi networks. You can sit down at many cafes or squares and plug directly into the net for free. And this hotel I'm at has a free network you just plug into. Many other cities could learn from that.
OK, I did have some problems at first. I had somehow packed a little quickly, and somehow got off without an ethernet network cable, and I somehow grabbed the U.S. type power cable for my laptop, without getting a converter plug. So the first evening I couldn't get into anything. I tried some of the public nets, but the one at the nearby Museums Quartier was incidentally down at that time, and when I found one by a McDonalds, it turned out to be one of those one had to register for, even though it was free, and I couldn't get the code without an Austrian cellphone. But I got all that remedied in the morning, after a quick trip to a computer store. More >
|
|
|
|
 3 Apr 2004 @ 05:27, by ming. Technology
Ton Zylstra recently commented on how the accepted norms around picture taking have changed. At least in a crowd of techies where everybody has at least one digital camera with them at all times. People no longer seem to mind constant picture taking. They mostly don't stop what they're doing and start posing. Which makes it easier to take good pictures of what is really going on.
Personally I always have a problem when taking pictures. I'm in the middle of some experience, and I'd like to capture it. But the moment I pull out my camera, it is already a different experience and the presense of the camera changes it a bit. Just as much because of my own hangups as based on people's reactions. As, really, a lot of people no longer care. But I somehow never have a photographer identity. Somebody who is a "real" photographer doesn't hesitate in walking up front and sticking a camera in somebody's face, and hanging around a bit to get a good shot. But that is often because they don't consider themselves part of the action, but rather an independent observer who can float around as they wish, and who consider themselves having the right to photograph whatever is there. I'm usually a lot more self-conscious and try not to intrude. And I personally have a hard time being invisible. So often I don't get the pictures that were there to be gotten.
What would appeal to me would be an always-on camera on my body that simply recorded everything I was seeing, and then I could go and pick out the good parts later. So I could then concentrate on my experiences, and I could reference the recordings based on my own peak moments, and go back and find the exact picture that best shows it.
There are all kinds of issues in that, of course. Such as privacy. Is it ok to record people covertly? What if there was a light that showed that recording was taking place? See, it doesn't have to be a secret, but I'd like to get around the akwardness of the picture taking moment. If everything is recorded, both I and others will get used to it and not change our behavior.
There's an article on Hewlett Packard's site about always-on cameras, and the various issues surrounding the idea. The privacy issues again. But they're also trying to address the technical issues of how to find the interesting moments. If you record what you did for 8 hours, chances are that most of it was really boring and not worth keeping. So, can some automated software tool help you pick out the good parts? Personally I don't care about that overly much. I'd be happy with the ability to scan through the recordings really quickly, and to reference them by time. I pretty much know what times were worthwhile, so I just need to be able to find them again, which I can do visually, if I can scan through the day in a couple of minutes.
HP doesn't seem to be planning a product any time soon. But somebody will do it. Within less than five years, I'm sure. A tiny multi-gigabyte harddisk can quite well record video of your whole day. A high quality camera can quite well fit unobtrusively into a pair of glasses. The technical problems aren't hard. And if first a bunch of techheads start having these, and others think it is cool, there's no turning back.
Despite that many people will have hesitations about allowing such things, I think there are many advantages and many side benefits. See Britt Blaser's idea of the Personal Flight Recorder. If lots of people have always-on cameras, continuously recording, crime as we know it will change. It is much harder to hide shadey dealings, much harder to deny what really went on. The key point is that these things will be in the hands of individuals, not some authoritarian government. Of course I'm trying to avoid thinking about scenarios where the FBI forces some backdoor to be built-in, so they can tap anybody's feed as they please. The answer is to put the technology into common use before they get around to demanding such things.
.. Whaddya know, no sooner have I written the above before a couple of synchronistic and very related items show up. So, for more exciting stuff on that, see Britt's recent post on "sousveillance", and Joi Ito's mention of an International Workshop on Inverse Surveillance in Toronto April 12th. Exactly on these kinds of subjects. See this topic list:* Camera phones and pocket organizers with sensors;
* Weblogs ('blogs), Moblogs, Cyborglogs ('glogs);
* Wearable camera phones and personal imaging systems;
* Electric eyeglasses and other computational seeing and memory aids;
* Recording experiences in which you are a participant;
* Portable personal imaging and multimedia;
* Wearable technologies and systems;
* Ethical, legal, and policy issues;
* Privacy and related technosocial issues;
* Democracy and emergent democracy (protesters organizing with SMS camphones);
* Safety and security;
* Technologies of lifelong video capture;
* Personal safety devices and wearable "black box" recorders;
* Research issues in "people looking at people";
* Person-to-person sharing of personal experiences;
* End of gender-specific space (e.g. blind man guided by wife: which restroom?);
* Subjectright: ownership of photograph by subject rather than photographer;
* Reverse copyright: protect information recipient, not just the transmitient;
* Interoperability and open standards;
* Algebraic Projective Geometry from a first-person perspective;
* Object Detection and Recognition from a first-person perspective;
* Computer Vision, egonomotion and way-finding technologies;
* Lifelong Image Capture: data organization; new cinematographic genres;
* New Devices and Technologies for ultra miniature portable cameras;
* Social Issues: fashion, design, acceptability and human factors;
* Electronic News-gathering and Journalism;
* Psychogeography, location-based wearable computing;
* Augmented/Mediated/Diminished Reality;
* Empowering children with inverse surveillance: Constructionist learning, creation of own family album, and prevention of both bullying by peers and abuse by teachers or other officials. And here, from Britt is a comparison of surveillance and "sousveillance". Splendid word.| Surveillance | Sousveillance |
|---|
| Sur-veiller is French for "to watch from above". | Sous-veiller is French for "to watch from below". | God's eye view from above.
(Authority watching from on-high.) | Human's eye view.
("Down-to-earth.") | | Cameras usually mounted on high poles, up on ceiling, etc. | Cameras down-to-earth (at ground level), e.g. at human eye-level. | | Architecture-centered (e.g. cameras usually mounted on or in structures). | Human-centered (e.g. cameras carried or worn by, or on, people). | | Recordings of an activity made by authorities, remote security staff, etc. | Recordings of an activity made by a participant in the activity. |
"Inverse surveillance is the imminent device-driven tsunami whereby we commoners take back our commons. We will be using our always-on videophones to capture the passing scene. The result will be that our blanket, overlapping and corroborating public record captured by our high-res private devices will overwhelm the spotty, lo-res record of incidents captured by so-called public surveillance devices."
Yeah, let's turn it all around. I love it. There's nowhere to hide from the people. More >
|
|
|
|
 3 Feb 2004 @ 14:36, by bombadil. Technology
It is likely to be only a matter of time until a machine can truly act and behave as a "ditto" as imagined by David Brin in the previous post, and take over some of the tasks we now handle ourselves (those of us who don't have a personal assistant, that is), at least via some media.
While researching the previous topic The Musing Muse happened to stumble onto this related article that was introduced some time ago on NCN's Newslog, The Musing Muse also ran into the following piece about the Turing Test by David Joerg: More >
|
|
|
|
 28 Dec 2003 @ 19:55, by ming. Technology
I spent the evening making my own news aggregator, and remarkably I succeeded to my satisfaction.
For any non-techies, a news aggregator is a program that sucks up data in RSS format, served by weblogs of various kinds, and presents it all in a uniform way.
I've tried a bunch of different aggregators. What I liked best was Radio Userland, because it shows the feeds together, looking like a weblog, and it seemed to be able to mainly show me a flowing stream of new stuff. Which I liked, but I'd kind of like more options. But when my paid license expired, I hesitated to renew it, because I wasn't really using it for its weblog or other functions. So I tried a variety of other programs.
FeedReader on Windows, which was nice. Except for that I don't like having to watch postings one at a time. I like the big overview. On Mac I then used Shrook for quite a while. It still had that 3-pane thing, and crashed every couple of hours, so it ended up not running most of the time. I tried installing NewsMonster, after its website made me feel kind of stupid, as it is so superior that it apparently can do everything, including a bunch of things I don't know what are. Except for that it couldn't find Java on my computer, and messed up some of the menus in Mozilla that it was supposed to integrate with. I installed Pears which runs in Python. Worked, but was a bit too simple. I installed AmphetaDesk, which required installing a whole bunch of Perl libraries first. And, now, I like the look of it. Quite a bit like Radio. But now there's again a bunch of things I'd want it to do that it doesn't do.
So, I woke up late and thought that if I could make my own aggregator, and I could finish it so it was functional today, I'd go for it. I really have other things to do, but it is Sunday and christmas, so nobody would be missing me too much.
Somewhat reluctantly I decided to look for a library that does the basic fetching of an RSS feed. My first thought was that I could just as well write that myself too, but that is the kind of arrogance that makes me often end up with projects full of features, but not quite finished, because I try to do it all myself. So I picked up the Magpie RSS library in PHP. Which seems simple enough, and I only needed some of its features.
Now, I decided to set it all up on my server, as opposed on my local machine, so I can make the functionality available for other users of my weblog program, and so the feeds can be cached amongst those users. And what I wanted was to store feeds and postings in mysql, so they can be kept indefinitely, and to be able to keep track of which ones have been read and stuff like that. So that is what I set up. A cron job picks up all channels every hour, and figures out what are new or updated postings. And then some PHP pages show which feeds one is subscribed to, which are available from the pool that is already on the server, and allows addition of new feeds. And one can see them either one at a time, or mixed together. And I borrowed somewhat the look from AmphetaDesk. But then I added the ability to keep track of which items in each feed a given user has read, and which ones they've at all seen. Then it can avoid showing what has been marked as read, and it can mark new postings with a little NEW icon. And I made it so the postings can be grouped by feed or by date. And they can be sorted in various ways. And I made a way of saving interesting postings to a separate place before they scroll away. And I added in the 50 or so feeds that I normally watch. And this already works better for me than any of the other aggregators I've used.
I'll tinker some more with it before I'll let anybody else use it. And there are a few more things I'd like to add. It should be able, of course, to pass a post on to my weblog program, if I want to quote it. I need some ways of searching through older postings. Some more options of viewing them. Like, headings only, short excerpts, with or without pictures, etc. Maybe a way of categorizing the saved postings. But this should do for today. More >
|
|
|
|
11 Dec 2003 @ 07:25, by ming. Technology
When I need a picture for one of my blog postings, I normally find something suitable really quickly, simply by searching in Google Images. Lots of great stuff is available.
But then there's the problem of whether I mention where it comes from. Do I give credit to the source of the picture?
It particularly becomes a problem in that some of the very best photography and art will often be found on a website of a professional photographer or artist. And the site will typically have some prominent Copyright statements, and often a whole page where the artist explains that they've put a lot of effort into their work, and they really should be paid for it.
If I get to a site like that, I usually turn around right away and never come back. Not because I wouldn't love to use the pictures. And not because I wouldn't happily mention who created them and where one can find more. But exactly because that typically isn't what is acceptable to that artist. Most likely, if I mentioned them, it would just give them a better way of coming after me and asking that I pay them money or take the picture down. So, instead, I forget about them as quickly as possible.
In my mind it represents an antiquated system of economics and it works against the interests of creative people. The oppressive concept of copyright, I mean. If I gave them a free mention and added exposure, I'd say that would help their business, not hurt it.
So, I usually give a credit only when the creator is both known and apparently not unwilling to share. If it is from some commerical site with no credits, I don't mention anything.
The answer could be that people used licenses from Creative Commons, and, generally, that there was a better understanding of how economics work nowadays. If you're an individual small-scale creative person, your personal economy will be supported by free mentions, and liberal permission to use for people who are never going to pay you anyway. Or, for that matter, if I could buy a picture for a suitably small amount of money, and do so easily, I might go for that. Like $1. More >
|
|
|
|
 9 Dec 2003 @ 11:31, by mre. Technology
Following up on the comments of the previous article, I have just posted my conclusions to the Chandler Design list. See the December Archives of the Design list for previous postings under the heading "Thoughts on a Browser Parcel". If the Open Software Foundation people respond positively to the idea of including Mozilla in the Chandler distribution, then perhaps Mitch Kapor's idea of a Mozilla toolbar could be made to work. Otherwise, we will go with our "Personal Portal" idea. More >
|
|
|
|
 24 May 2003 @ 23:14, by ming. Technology
Back from New York. Got some good work done with Britt Blaser on xpertweb, working through the steps of a functioning prototype. The picture there is from last night. Hanging out with Britt and Doc Searls, having a splendid time talking about geeky stuff and playing with computers. Doc mentions it here. He is in town to check out the state of publically available WiFi in New York. Which is pretty damned great. Wireless access in a number of parks, from many businesses who want to make customers feel at home, and from many individuals who've just left their networks open.
If you somehow don't know who Doc Searls is, he's co-author of Cluetrain Manifesto, senior editor of Linux Journal, and general Über-Blogger. I'm impressed by the effortlessness of his blogging approach. He just sort of wam-bam zips in and posts a few sentences, using an outliner for the content of the day, while he's on the phone and answering e-mail and having a conversation, all at the same time. I'm not sure I would be able to do it like that, but I can certainly see the point. Answer your e-mail in public, as he describes it. I personally tend to need to switch into some kind of Inspired Quest mode before it flows for me. But, hey, maybe his routine day every day IS an Inspired Quest, I don't know. More >
|
|
|
|
 13 May 2003 @ 14:08, by spectragon. Technology
Several years ago, projections based on then current computing industry growth rate indicated that computers would soon approach the eight terabyte (8 trillion byte) storage capacity of the human brain. There are now computers that possess this capacity but at that time, it got me to consider what attribute might enable man’s creation to qualify as sentient. Having been raised Catholic, the concept of free will came to mind as the quality in which we were ” created in the image and likeness of our creator”. So I started with a flow chart of free will, in attempt to understand the underlying algorithm. The backbone of that flow chart looked something like this:
[Diagram was aparently not formated in way that could be viewed as an embeded image.]
Next I had to develop a fractal pattern generating equation that would enable the unit cell of this flow chart to dynamically self propagate. The result was a model that, when initial values were assigned to the variables, exhibited the potential to develop the diversity of wills displayed in the general populace.
A colleague commented that computers would not be on par with man until they possessed the capacity to experience pleasure. Desire for pleasure is, after all, the engine that drives free will.
A response to this line of reasoning might be that computers will never rise to the stature of man because we are more than mechanisms, we are spiritual entities. I acknowledge the spiritual perspective to existence. The documentation of near death experiences, remote viewing etc. provide irrefutable evidence that the mind of an individual continues to function when the brain waves have “flat-lined”, however the brain, itself is none the less the organic computer whose soft ware provides the model of reality presented during our normal daily experience. That being the case, if man were to construct the appropriate architecture would a spiritual entity in the market for that sort of real estate take up residence? More >
|
|
|
|
8 May 2003 @ 23:59, by ming. Technology
My printer suddenly started to print, and spat out a page that contained only this:
# Keep this simple, explicit, and redundant
V8
Ou0
Og0
OL0
Oeq
OQ/tmp
I hadn't asked it to print anything. Has never happened before. Well, it is a network connected printer, with its own IP, so I suppose somebody could have initiated it from elsewhere. Except for that it has a password.
A quick search in Google showed me that this is part of the standard content of mail.cf, one of sendmail's configuration files. Could be from one of my servers, but it would still be a mystery how it ended up on my printer.
Or maybe it is just good advice from the ethers. Keep it simple, explicit, and redundant. I'll try to remember. More >
|
|
<< Newer entries Page: 1 2 3 4 Older entries >> |
|
