Two new places I learned about at the Berkeley New Media Conference were Neopets and Whyville.

Neopets is a place where kids create virtual pets, enter them into contests, build community, etc. etc. Neopets is apparently huge, drawing large numbers of visitors for very long stays. Large as in rivaling the major sites (CNN, ABC, Yahoo). Long as in approaching a couple of hours a day.

Whyville is oriented towards math and science education. While not quite garnering the same numbers, the number of females on Whyville is striking. In the early phases of the site, they had a close to 60/40 split in favor of girls. With some tweaking they've made it closer to 50/50, but there are still more girls and they are very active participants.

There are two striking commonalities of these sites. First, neither does any marketing. In fact, the organization behind Whyville is ridiculously small. (I'd tell you, but then I'd have to shoot you).

Finally, and much more relevant to NMH, both communities wind up reconstructing the concept of a newspaper institution. Whyville has the Whyville Times, and Neopets has the Newtopian News, if I remember correctly. (Correction: Neotopian News)

Memo to self: smells like a paper to me

I was thinking about writing something similar myself, but Tim Apnel has taken care of my need for command line rebuild of an MT site.

Memo to self: kick tires on this one.

I was in Berkeley at the New Media Conference over the weekend. The soiree was jointly run by the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and USC's Annenberg School of Communication. I've got copious trip notes which I plan on distilling and posting as a bit of a blog coming out party.

The theme of the conference was roughly "how the 'net generation gets its news", however most of the presentations focused on what youth can do/have done with digital technology. I need to chew on this bon mot for a bit, but maybe the biggest takeaway is that the classroom is the primary place where youth actually "get news". This is where society trains them that there is a concept of "news" and what their expectations of it should be. I'll leave it at that because this needs more thought.

The highlights for me were John Seely Brown's keynote (covered in detail by Mary Hodder), and Will Wright's 8 minutes on how Maxis now thinks about games. Wright handed me a disc with slides of his talk, which I'll see if it's okay to post. JSB also promised to ship his.

Since my TiBook is starting to act up (daily crash on sleep), it's time to start looking around for something. Maybe the Mini-TiBook, depending upon the reviews, although I've yet to read a positive critique.

IXI Mobile is developing infrastructure software to support personal area networks across Bluetooth. The initial focus looks to be gadget oriented: cell phones, cameras, watches.

Memo to IXI: the killer connection is to display devices, think plasma tv in airport

Continuing in the stream of web based personal photo management tools is Fotonotes.net. Looks cool and if it doesn't have PhotoMesa baked in, it sure is competition for it.

Yet another Shirky essay to shake the blogosphere, essentially arguing that Wi-Fi is/will eat 3G's lunch. The crux of the argument is the age old CS "worse is better" story. Crappy and cheap spreads faster and evolves quickly enough to put good and expensive out of business.

Alternatively, people's communication patterns resemble camels rather than fish.

Kevin Lynch has a developer's inside view of what Macromedia Central is intended to do. Much more concise and to the point than the whitepaper.

Looks like Macromedia has plans to make Flash much more of a standalone, cross-platform, virtual media engine. Macromedia Central looks like a much more regimented JVM to me. The attendant white paper is an amazing piece of puffery (application integration hasn't advanced since the 70's? c'mon), but the actual meat is downright scary. Looks like an unescapable payment mechanism is baked in.

NMH Wisdom: good luck unseating the Web browser as a primary interface, only hope is to be a big hit in the enterprise

This one will be making the rounds. eyebees looks like yet another version of group Web surfing. Maybe the buzzword compliant marketing ("the base camp of swarming"? yick!!) will get the concept over the hump this time, but this has always been a solution in search of a problem.

According to Steven Johnson, a John Bury put this together, but the "who we are" link only identifies George Witteveen and Marco Bunge. Odd.

Henry Lieberman fires on the CHI community for getting stuck under the lamppost of user studies. I would add that this seems to be somewhat endemic to any number of areas of computer science. Just because we can measure all sorts of wacky things, doesn't mean they give us any insight.

Then again, a devil's advocate might argue that Lieberman's screed is just sour grapes for a rejected CHI paper.

Apropos of nothing, via 37Signals comes a tale of how Broadway producer David Merrick gamed the New York network of criticism. In short, this is an MIT grade hack.

Probably somewhere between blink tag irritation and bookmarklet utility is Brian Boyer's IndyJunior, a Flash application for displaying geographic location on a map. Big deal you say? Well Boyer's nicely packaged the utility to read its data dynamically from an XML file, minimizing effort to update. Tres cool.

NMH Wisdom: sorta like those Google search boxes everyone threw on their blog

Thanks to our local UCSD transplant, Ben Shapiro, I just got the heads up on JussPress. Haven't had a chance to dig in, but it looks like a different take on Fotolog.net where the modus operandi is "lots of pictures, no text."

Somebody needs to hook these two projects together.

Memo to audience: Ben is taking NetLogo a quantum leap forward. Watch out for this kid.

Over at News.Com, perspective is starting to trickle in regarding Intel's Centrino announcements. Michael Kanellos asks "Will wireless computing fundamentally change the relationship people have with their computers..." and then claims, "The future of the PC market hangs on that question."

Unfortunately the rest of his discussion then focuses on rather mundane activities which are mainly desktop PC oriented. A slight nod is given to the potential role of cell phones in the future.

Well I, along with the guys at Mobitopia, think this is fairly shortsighted. Here's my response to Kanellos' question. Yes, if PC stands for "Personal Computing" as opposed to "Personal Computer."

Note that in the very near future, it may be possible to carry out the former without owning any of the latter.

The MovableType folks have put together a tutorial on TrackBack, a potentially emerging new technology for weblog based notification. I say potentially because it's unclear how widespread and popular TrackBack will become. There's currently a lot of activity among ultra-geeks (even farther ahead than early adopters), but even I'm having a real hard time getting hopped up about it, and I really like this stuff!!

In general, I find attempts to support "cross-site discussion" oxymoronic. It's akin to taking a USENET newsgroup and spreading it across n different sites, where n is large enough to make following the discussion chaotic. Contrary to popular belief, centralization is sometimes a good thing.

Memo to self: investigate CSCW literature regarding asynchronous conversation

While a bit stale, this transcript of JC Herz, at some high-falutin' conference in Amsterdam, is very on point regarding mod culture in games.

Actually, this is a complete vanity link because I've been locked in a room with JC discussing games on occasion. There's no way I could ever verify myself as inspiration, but at one point within her earshot I remember saying, "There's gonna be a whole generation of kids who expect everything to be moddable!"

Memo to audience: Note wacky side banners/images

10 good tips for weblog writing, as provided by Rebecca Blood. I'm still working on the linking to other bloggers bit, but think I'm solid in most other areas.

Fotolog.net provides free hosting for photograph based weblogs. The gist is that folks might post one or two photo highlights of the day for their friends and family.

Scary thought, there are way more people who can/will snap a few photos and post them, then folks who'll surf the web and blog a few links.

Bill McCoy is trying to build a blogging system using IMAP. Hmmmm, all of this activity to merge blogging into other forms must say something about the underlying form. At the least, bloggers are very determined... or stupid.

Elizabeth Lane Lawley has some feature requests that would improve MovableType. Mainly the requests focus on simplifying MT for newbies, which is perfectly fine. I'll take this moment though to document the one feature request that would take MT to the next level for me as a backend hacker: arbitrary metadata on posts.

Attaching key/value pairs of strings to posts can probably be done just by extending the MT::Entry object but getting it baked throughout the entire system involves more time than I have. Still, such a mechanism generalizes a number of MT features, e.g. categories.

Gil Scott-Heron would be proud of Eddan Katz's homage.

I need to dig in a little more since it was fairly well hidden, but the Information Dynamics Lab within HP Labs, is working on understanding complex distributed systems, whether of machines, cells, or people.

infoSyncworld's Jorgen Sundgot has a detailed, compact summary of TI's Wanda chip and reference design. Things to note, reference design allegedly out by April 2003, with manufacturers only needing 6 months from there to build the thing.

The catch? No takers so far.

NMH Wisdom: good idea, prospects cloudy

Memo to self: subscribe to the infoSyncworld newsletter

Want to write a MovableType plug-in? Timothy Appnel has got the goods, in spades.

Dan Gillmor just gives the Mobitopia guys more grist in commenting that "The CTIA Wireless trade show is the annual U.S. reminder of how far we are behind the rest of the world."

That said he did manage to find some cool new phones soon to be available in the US.

Simply for his own needs, Micah Alpern has put together search, across the feeds he subscribes to.

Good idea++

Over at the ZDNet AnchorDesk, the widely read David Coursey, gave out his 5 forces shaping mobile technology. All seem relatively legit and straightforward if you're coming from the PC universe, as Coursey does.

Of course, the Mobitopia guys are coming from the phone world, and point out that the mobile space ain't the PC world, just smaller. I might have to agree, but further consideration is needed.

I can tell you from painful experience, trying to program a mobile device with old versions of the mobile Win32 APIs was truly painful. An undergraduate of mine is having better luck with PocketPC 2002, but I think the Mobitopia guys have the right spin.

According to JD Lasica, there's quite a bit more going on at Berkeley next week other than the New Media Conference. I'll actually be attending that micro-conference, but would definitely have hit town earlier to hear the likes of Lasica, Vin Crosbie, and Cory Doctorow. And it would have been Musashi++, Zachary's++, Cactus Taqueria++, ...

Sigh.

I wish Ben Hammersley's book, "Content Syndication with RSS", would ship. It would make my academic citations a hell of a lot easier.

The Register rips Microsoft a new one regarding its smart phone strategy, noting how European and Japanese manufacturers own 95% of the market and are kicking Big Green's ass in the developer support area.

Of course, it's been oft predicted, but this could become Gates' Waterloo if computing innovation seriously migrates to the phonetop from the desktop.

Bonus nugget: the article connects with the excellent Mobitopia team weblog. If you have to ask what it's about, you probably shouldn't be here.

Sebastien Paquet (sorry about losing the accent) maintains a nice blog covering a wide range of issues at the intersection of knowledge management tools and academia, at least as I interpret it. Two of his more interesting recent articles are "Towards Structured Blogging" and "Personal Knowledge Publishing and its Uses in Research".

Okay, so the latter is only recent to me. Sue me.

Roland Piquepaille put together a nice article on InFlow among other social network mapping tools, and then followed it up with tools suggestions from the rest of the Web.

Long on rhetoric, but a bit short on practicals, Antoine Neron's OpenBlog Project, launched with "The Real Tragedy of the Commons", might bear some watching.

Embedded within an HP Labs research project on the Semantic Web, is work on semantic weblogging for bibliographies.

An article by Keith Hammonds in FastCompany attempts to dig into our favorite search company and present the core principles of Google. The link has been kicking around the blogosphere, but not with much analysis to my mind.

The article is interesting to me for two reasons. Primarily it has details of how Google News came to be and where it's going. Secondarily, the type of people Google hires is really interesting. Holzle is/was a hardcore programming language design and implementation guy. Norvig is a longtime AI and dynamic languages (Lisp and Python) hacker. Bharat was more of a networking, distributed systems type. Google goes after really good people who can stretch themselves.

Oh and the company has that passion and paranoia so often exhibited in Redmond, WA. It actually might not be overstating the case to say that Google is "the Microsoft of search engines."

Adrian Holovaty is not a sports fan, but I am. Thankfully, he's done quite a service examining NCAA brackets posted by various online publishers such as Sports Illustrated, FOXSports.com and ESPN.com.

Given that these brackets are big moneymakers for these guys, or at least big traffic generators, a good usability study of brackets as interfaces would probably provide some interesting results.

One thing that always irritated me about them, is that they never supported incremental construction. For example, I like to research one regional, fill out the bracket, research another regional, fill it out, etc. These things never have a concept of saving your current state, which is pretty bad considering how much information you have to provide.

Memo to self: get working on your brackets!!

Texas Instruments announced a new concept device called WANDA, reports MacCentral and CNet. The device is essentially a cell phone with uber-connectivity: GSM, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi. Conceptually the right thing to do, but as CNet points out, Wi-Fi and battery life don't go well together. First prototypes are supposed to appear by the end of the year claims TI.

NMH Wisdom: enthusiastic support, skeptical of delivery

As a sidenote, there's a big telecommunications conference this week, with lots of computing players making announcements apparently.

Not that I'm a huge Tcl/Tk fan, but a nice, robust, easily installed version for Macos X, might make Python and Perl GUI development much more tolerable. Especially for cross platform support. But if you're strictly Macos X, seems to me you're probably better off trying to use Cocoa.

With his usual thorough level of detail, Mark Pilgrim discusses how, and why, he built a custom mobile edition of diveintomark.org.