|
|
 13 Jun 2005 @ 22:58, by ming. Technology
This is a snapshot that Michael Heileman took from his iChat program during the Reboot conference.
If you didn't know, Apple has this protocol called Bonjour, which used to be called Rendezvous. That was a better name, but somebody else sued them for the rights to it. Anyway, what it does is, quite automatically, to notice who's close by on the same local network. So, this is not this person's buddy list across the net. Here it is the people who're present in the same room. Which he might or might not know.
You open up your laptop computer and, bing, right away you see this. And you could of course send these people messages and chat with them, if you had the need. The point is that it is super-easy and automatic. You don't have to go and ask anybody for their username or anything.
This has so far been a Mac-only trick. But Bonjour has just become open source and will become available for any other platform too. There's no particular reason for it to be Mac only. David Weinberger was sitting typing away on his IBM Thinkpad, so he didn't show. It was about 1/2 each of Mac and Windows in that particular location. Windows has never been cool, and amongst famous techie bloggers, a Mac Powerbook is by far the platform of choice. Anyway, that's not the point. Would be better if this worked, no matter what you were running.
Bonjour/Rendezvous is also what enabled instant collaboration through a program called SubEthaEdit. It works over Bonjour. So, you open it up, and instantly you can see who's working on documents in your local area. And if they let you, you can join in in editing the documents. Which looks absolutely magical for collaborative note taking. Each person gets a different color, and all changes are being shown in real time. And it actually works. You can add to other people's notes, take turns, make corrections, etc. Some people are good at taking quotes down verbatim, others are really good at organizing the whole document. And it is basically done when the speech is done, and can be uploaded to a website, for even more people to look at.
I stayed at a Hotel in Vienna for BlogTalk last year. Nobody had said anything about the connection in the hotel, but there was a plug, and as a good techie I scanned the ethernet traffic and guessed at what settings to use and got online in no time. And lo-and-behold, a few other people showed up on rendezvous who had done the same, and I could instantly ask them when the program started, which I somehow had missed too. Plus help somebody who hadn't guessed what IP number to use for the router.
Anyway, nothing new for the folks who're using this all the time, but a little technical magic to share with the people who don't. More >
|
|
|
|
 12 Jun 2005 @ 19:47, by ming. Technology
The Reboot conference in Denmark was very enjoyable. Nice to be in my home country for a couple of days, and lots of great speakers and contacts.
I'm by now used to that a techie conference like that is very wired, but it is still something that would probably be weird to many people. When somebody's speaking, about half the audience is sitting typing on their laptops. They check any websites mentioned, they make collaborative notes, they chat on IRC, they post to their blogs, they coordinate where to go for dinner, or they do whatever they feel like. The result is that there are more dimensions to whatever is going on, and that you probably are more informed, and information is more cross-indexed for you.
Through the magic of tags, you can see most of the blog postings from participants on the Technorati reboot page. It doesn't work great for me personally to make blog postings in real-time, but it is cool that it works for lots of other people. Before a speech even is over, you'll see the first blog postings, and you'll see the pictures people have posted to Flickr. Right this second, there are 1035 photos posted to Flickr on Reboot, and 91 blog postings found by Technorati.
I can't mention everything, but a few highlights from the program...
Inspired keynotes by Doc Searls and David Weinberger, two of the authors of Cluetrain Manifesto. Weinberger was on fire, as somebody said. Doc is always entertaining.
Keynote by Cory Doctorow. In addition to being a science fiction author and editor of BoingBoing, Cory is a big champion for EFF. He talked about some of the latest battles, like the Broadcast Flag. He is very skilled at boiling the issues down to the essential hardhitting facts. There are companies and government agencies in the pocket of Hollywood media companies that work very hard on delivering LESS to you, for MORE money. "Sorry, we've revoked your right to record that TV program".
Lee Bryant on
Negotiating Language and Meaning with Social Tagging. Lee is brilliant and provides great examples of how to use some of this cool technology in real and practical settings. Like for effective community websites for non-profit and government institutions. His recipees are very worth examining.
 Ben Hammersley is crazy and entertaining. His talk, 300 Years of Blogging, Etiquette and the Singularity, presented the idea that blogging has parallels to the phenomenon of papers with comments on issues of the day that were handed out and discussed in coffee houses in England 300 years ago. And he made some intriguing comments on how rudeness and embarrassment might be bigger issues than technology on the net for most people. You know, for his grandmother, the issue of adware on her computer putting stuff up she doesn't want is just so damned rude. It isn't an issue of what flaws IE might have, it is just rude behavior. And how some people might be very conscious of what other people might think, and therefore hold themselves back from doing stuff they technically could do easily. Like his wife who wanted to participate in a certain game, but was afraid to, because she didn't want to be seen doing something wrong, or accidentally messing something up for somebody.
 Jimbo Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, talked about ... Wikipedia. An interesting angle is that he doesn't at all consider it this emergent swarm phenomenon. It isn't just a chaotic buzz of little ants that do different things, and that somehow a useful encyclopedia emerges from that. On the contrary, it is quite hierarchical. Yes, anybody can in princple go and, anonymously, write and change anything they like. But, really, that's mainly for PR. Most things get written or edited by a rather small percentage of known users. It is a community. A community where people have taken on particular roles, based on their track record, reputation, and how well trusted they are. Most things get worked out by real people talking them over, not by any automated voting system or anything. Some people have more say than others, because they've earned it.
 Saturday night was a showing of the famous 1968 Doug Engelbart demo. "The mother of all demos". A bunch of smart people at the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park showed how they imagined computers should work in the future. At a time when computers mainly were big mainframes that did nothing of the sort. They invented the mouse, and one could click and drag (sort of) on the screen, and draw lines directly on the screen. And one could collaborate on a document, with video conferencing, and create outlines of information, etc. It was both amazing for the amount of foresight those guys had, and for a look into how terribly difficult it was. They could just sort of barely hold the system together for the demo, with six people and a whole lot of the most expensive hardware they could get their hands on. Doing things we nowadays take for granted, but which only got to happen because pioneers like them MADE it happen, against the odds. Doug Engelbart himself introduced the video over an iChat video link, and participated in a Q&A afterwards. Which I didn't stay for, because it was getting really late.
Lots more, but you can find plenty of commentary in the other sources. More >
|
|
|
|
10 Jun 2005 @ 20:21, by vaxen. Technology
License To Chill -- Hackers Hamstring Rights Violators
SUMMARY: International hacker organization issues software license that allows the group or its licensees to take human rights violators to court.
CROSSHAIRS: This story is important for anyone interested in hacking, human rights, information security, open-source software, Internet censorship, international law, international politics, or technology transfer. More >
|
|
|
|
 25 Mar 2005 @ 17:00, by ming. Technology
Yahoo has a new search feature, for materials with Creative Commons licenses. I.e. typically stuff you can use freely if you just mention where they come from, or maybe that you can only use non-commercially.
Wait, how do they know? I search for my own blog, and it came up with a page here where indeed I mentioned that I consider what I write here to be in the public domain. Really, what I should do should be to put a proper CC image and link here that says so. I've so far labeled it as Primarily Public Domain which really fits best. But I like the idea that a formalized piece of xml will be allow various services to automatically find content with a certain license or dedication. So, I've added the public domain code from CC in my sidebar now.
Anyway, there's a growing number of ways one can search for liberally licensed content.
America Free TV gives you online streaming video programming like that.
OurMedia offers free hosting for CC licensed media.
Of course Creative Commons itself has a search.
Flickr lets you search for pictures based on their licenses. Flickr who btw was bought by Yahoo this week, who promises to let them keep doing what they're doing.
I'm sure there are others. More >
|
|
|
|
 11 Mar 2005 @ 12:19, by ming. Technology
Second Life is a massively multiplayer online world. One can build stuff, design one's own avatars (virtual bodies), one can program it. One is the owner of what one creates and there's opportuties for trade and business. Via BoingBoing, here are some notes from a speech by Cory Ondrejka, the VP of Product Development for Linden Labs, the company that makes it.Second Life allows users to collaborate and teach each other. Learning scripting: it’s easy, you have immediate feedback, and other people are willing to help. People spread knowledge and do FAQs. SL really encourages this. As an example: skydiving classes, ingame. Players sell lessons and parachutes. Skydiving became a huge fad in SL for a while. Abbot’s Skydiving sells equipment and airplanes to go up in. An elevator to 4000 feet. Total freedom to create. A service.
Another example of collaborative business: VERTU is a group in RL. They contacted the EFF and wanted to do a fundraise in SL. They raised 1700 bucks. Next month (for Charity X) they did 1900. Then for Hurricane Relief = 2000 US. People in these spaces recognise the virtual currency has value. Philanthropy, giving .. having an impact back on the RL is a real possibility.
Tringo, the current SL fad. A cross between tetris and bingo. Someone in SL wanted a fun social game to play ingame. He created Tringo. In the 3 months since, he’s generated the equivalent of 4000 US in Tringo. He just licensed the realworld distribution rights to Tringo to a mobile game company. Because SL lets him maintain the rights to his IP, he can distribute said rights in the real world, although apparently part of the deal is that he continues to manage the rights individually ingame. Gee, I don't have time, but I could really get into that. I was hooked on Alphaworld, oh, almost 10 years ago. My buildings were still there, last I looked. But the environment didn't advance a whole lot since then, and there wasn't all that many people there. And there are so many more cool things one can do with virtual worlds. I've of course noticed that games have gotten much more fancy graphically in the meantime. But I don't have any particular interest in the types of games where you walk around and get killed all the time, by folks who've got bigger guns than you have. But I like building stuff. Second Life looks quite similar to Alphaworld, so it is not that things have advanced enormously. But the increased programability makes the difference. Sounds like Second Life is getting a lot of things right. So, if I just had some quiet weekends with nothing to do.
|
|
|
|
 10 Feb 2005 @ 16:00, by ming. Technology
Google has a new Map service. Which maybe at first looks like any other online map thing. You can see the streets in some area, map a route somewhere, search for addresses and that kind of thing. But Google has a knack for making services that are really simple, and look really simple, but that use a lot of hidden wizardry. They effortlessly do things that most professional web developers would swear would be impossible to do in a webpage. But, ok, we're catching on now. So whenever they come out with something new, somebody will dissect it and tell us how they did it.
There's Google Suggest that magically can provide you lists of possible search terms as you're typing, complete with number of matches for each. Chris Justus did a thorough job dissecting that. They use the XMLHttp for exchanging data with the server in real time.
And there's Gmail. Again, seems very simple. But it does spell checking and addressbook lookups in real time. Stuff I had gotten used to accepting that one just couldn't do in webpages. But you can, with XMLHttp and with iFrames. And with some extremely responsive servers. Various people have analyzed Gmail, like John Vey. Part of their trick is that the user interface gets stored at the client's end, so that only data is passed back and forth to the server. As opposed to "normal" webpages where everything is sent from the server whenever you load a new page.
Now Joel Webber has dissected Google Maps. So, some of the same tricks again with real-time server communication, in part using a hidden iframe. And then there's the infinitely scrolling maps. The trick is in part to make them out of little tiles, and removing some at one end while adding new ones at the other end, in real time. And routes are added on top with transparent PNG files.
Now, if somebody could just pay me for duplicating some of those tricks so I can get time to study up on them. Or my skills are suddenly getting a little old. More >
|
|
|
|
 10 Jan 2005 @ 10:37, by jazzolog. Technology
Tom Toles' great work is available all the time online at [link] .
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The great man is one who never loses his child's heart.
---Mencius
In eternity there is indeed something true and sublime. But all these times and places and occasions are now and here. God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages.
---Henry David Thoreau
The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
---William James
James' implication of course is what not to overlook either. Am I seeing things or is Tom Toles becoming even more brilliant with each day? This cartoon is for yesterday but should live through the ages. It has layers of meaning that make me want to ask a lot of questions. More >
|
|
|
|
    9 Jan 2005 @ 13:06, by ming. Technology
BoingBoing had a couple of postings, here and here, about somebody having noticed that Google had indexed a lot of web cameras, and it is easy to list them if you know how the URLs tend to look for certain manufacturers' viewing pages.
The sort of mischievous thing about that is that many of these folks might not have intended for their webcams to be that public and easy to find. Well, obviously they can't be all that secret either. Google will only find them if they're linked from some other public page somewhere. And we're talking about cameras that are viewable for anybody who accesses that IP number in a web browser.
Anyway, I like webcams, and I was anyway thinking about making some webcam pages, so I couldn't resist going a little further on this opportunity. So, look at this page I just made. I grabbed the URLs of the first 500 or so of those pages from Google (using the SOAP interface). I figured out how to grab the currently first image from one of those streams. And then I set up a thing that scans through them every couple of hours and take a snapshot from each. And then, since we'd like to know where they are, I ran the IPs through HostIP which tells us the country and sometimes the city. So, you click on any one of them and you see the live video, at least if your browser can handle Motion JPEG. IE seems to have a problem with that.
Hopefully I won't hear from anybody's lawyer too soon. It seems harmless enough. You can see some airport lobbies, some streets and freeways, some people working in offices, some museums, some malls, some factory assembly lines, a school cafeteria, somebody's aquarium, a hangar where somebody parks their corporate jet, the snow conditions on some ski slopes. Doesn't seem to be any private bedrooms or anything like that.
What I like about webcams is not particularly the snooping, but more the telepresence. You can a little bit be somewhere else, far away, and watch a slice of life going by. More >
|
|
|
|
19 Nov 2004 @ 11:33, by lugon. Technology
There are quite a few things, good and bad and intriguing, which, each in itself, seem to work by positive feedback loops.
They also help each other to thrive and meta-multiply. It's a bit like fireworks out of control, with firecrackers lighting each other up. That's what they call "synergies".
We can attempt to make a list of things that reinforce each other. What I see from here could be improved on, I'm sure. But, anyway, this is what I currently see:
- free software
- blogs
- open space
- new currencies
- sustainability research
- Bush (yes, he's a great motivator for "us")
- oil shortage (same reason)
- ...
What else should I add? Can you help me?
I'm sure the list can't possibly become complete.
But it may not be a matter of making a full, comprehensive list of "things that help each other grow". It's also a matter of creating links between such things where the existing links are weak. Just as an example, at cyfranogi they are using free software.
There's something else that might arise from our list. Maybe by looking at the "map of links" we can try and find new possible synergies. An obvious (not so new) one would be to make community currencies work very well for sustainability purposes. Focus on that specific spot. Zoom in and look for huge benefits. Get creative about it.
We can, of course, also take what's just global right now and make it local (and contagious) and so more powerful.
What else can we do? How do we get to do it?
Yes, we can step back and look at the whole picture of synergies. How could we make this list a workable, good-looking, memetically useful thing?
Thanks for your precious contributions! More >
|
|
|
|
 21 Jul 2004 @ 06:45, by ming. Technology
So, over the years I've written all these software modules for an assortment of online purposes. Like: - Weblogs
- Bulletin Boards
- Chat Rooms
- Calendars
- File Sharing
- Membership Sites
- Online Directories
- Work Groups
- Personal Information Management
- Shopping Carts
- Online Website Generation
- Forms and Database Generation
- Mailing List Management
- DNS Administration
- Server Monitoring
- Content Management
- News Feed Aggregation
- Image Manipulation
- ... and Wikis
And probably some I'm forgetting right now. All of it is in use in one place or another. And some of it isn't half bad. For that matter, some of it was a bit ahead of its time. And the users of some of these things seem exeedingly happy with what they do.
But there's a considerable problem with spreading oneself that thin as a programmer. Most succesful programmers will do one or two great things, or they'll have a team to work with.
Anyway, since I don't really, the result is that all of my modules are somewhat unfinished. Or, rather, they work well in the particular setting they were made for. As long as I manage the server, and fix things that go wrong, and tweak them for new purposes. But it doesn't mean they're easy to export.
I've been paid well for making some of these things, and some of them I made because I needed them myself, or to make nice places to hang out online. But generally I've never figured out how to make the jump to making a business out of any of them. And neither have I made the jump to package them as open source packages that people can just take and use, and others can contribute to.
And, well, Internet time moves quickly. So, while I can still enjoy that my weblog program does some things better than any other weblog program I've tried, other pieces are at the risk of slipping into obscurity, by being somewhat outdated and mediocre in how they look and what they can do. And across the board I've missed a lot of opportunities for doing something with these things at a higher level.
I can't count the number of times I've shown a selection of these programs to some business-wise person, who's told me that I could take any one of these and turn it into a thriving business. Usually accompanied by stories of people who've made it big with some fairly mediocre piece of software or other product, that they just managed to position well, and work hard on it, until it became a viable enterprise.
But which one should I pick? I'd be leaning towards most all of them. That is, a membership site where the users can easily set up an assortment of different resources, by picking from a menu and doing a bit of configuation. OK, so you want a website, and it should have a weblog and newsfeeds and a shopping cart and an event calendar, and you want an intranet for your employees with spaces for different teams and wikis, etc. Shouldn't be any great reason you shouldn't be able to have that up and running in a day or so, without needing to download any software or having to know any HTML.
I call that OrgSpace. That's a registered trademark. There's a corporation ready in England with that name. I've talked a good deal with Julie about launching something of that nature, starting back when we had a company in L.A. called Synchronicity. I've discussed pieces of it to great length with quite a few people.
But it doesn't work if I'm the sole programmer. And I'm sofar not as much of an entrepreneur as I'd like to be. So, it is stranding a bit both on the level of finishing the software, and on the level of doing the normal stuff one does to start and run and grow a business.
It could take all sorts of formats and directions. Like, a particular software piece might be a separate product in itself. Doesn't have to be an all or nothing proposition. It depends on what other people are inspired to be part of.
But I need programmers to collaborate with. We're talking about PHP. People who aren't as inclined to start from scratch as I am, but who'd feel inspired to do great things with pieces that already are 70% there, and to work as part of a team. This is in no way beginner's stuff, so some hardcore coding ability is needed.
A graphical design and layout person would be very helpful too. Most of my sites look like they were made in 1995, mostly because they actually were.
Some business help would be a good thing. I'm not ignorant of the basics, so it is maybe more a matter of coaching. Well, of course if one of you just wanted to finance the whole thing, that would certainly make everything easier.
But, barring that, we're talking about people who're interested in freely collaborating for the purpose of future business, or for making useful open source software, and useful online services. Or in making online communities and networks that work better. Whatever inspires you, and whatever format that is structured in. I can easily think of a variety of avenues for business or rewarding non-profit activities. I just need to get beyond wearing the programmer hat all the time. And I'm not going to give away just all the secrets here.
My own problem is that I'm a perfectionist, so I'm not the right person to do everything myself. It doesn't mean I'm necessarily hard to work with, but it means that I'm usually not sufficiently happy with what I do to get it out the door. You know there's the wise rule of 80/20 that says that you go for making 80% of what needs doing, and you get it out the door. And in the next iteration you do 80% of what is left. The hard lesson for a perfectionist to learn is that other people than yourself usually are quite happy with the 80% solution, as long as you actually put it into their hands.
A few little anecdotes:
I gave my shopping cart code to somebody once, when I considered it just half-way done, even though it basically worked. Somebody who was a much more novice programmer than myself. He worked hard for a month and set up a flashy online shopping mall site, where quickly hundreds of customers had paid for having their own online stores.
I wasn't very satisfied with my online website design tool, even though it actually did much more than anything else available at the time. Unbeknownst to me at first, a big Beverly Hills newspaper used the beta test demo version to put their whole paper online every week, with all previous issues archived. I would have said it was impossible, as it wasn't really a content management system suited for that purpose, but they found ways of working it so that it did what they needed, and were quite happy with it.
I made this opt-in mailing list management system. It handled mailing lists with several million subscribers and daily mailings. One of the companies using it wanted a faster mailing engine. I knew very well what to do, but I needed a C programmer to do a fairly minor piece for me, but instead I insisted on trying to do it myself, and procrastinated it. So instead they spent 1/2 million dollars or so on somebody else's system, which was inferior on various other counts, but it mailed really quickly, and it was supported around the clock by a team of people, where I was just myself.
You catch the drift, I'm sure.
So, if you're the right kind of person, and any of this is of the slightest interest, let me know. More >
|
|
<< Newer entries Page: 1 2 3 4 Older entries >> |
|
