Thanks to Wesley Felter, I ran across the LoCI Lab at the University of Tennessee. I just briefly scanned the site, but it looks like they have some interesting ideas about applying principles from the field of logistics to the Internet.
No byline on a report from the EETimes that WR Hambrecht's analysts think that Intel's Centrino ain't all it's cranked up to be. The gist: Intel is charging too big a premium (wtf?!) and restricting to 802.11b is shortsighted with 802.11a/g just around the corner.
Then again, that's only one data point.
Looking at some old Kevin Lynch posts I noticed one remarking on i-Mode and Flash. This led to one of those "vision videos" corporations oft put together. DoCoMo's is somewhat hokey (all right, really hokey), and somewhat old school (in terms of vision), but has a few neat ideas.
Memo to self: view video on computer with a little more juice than my PowerBook.
Kevin Lynch, a developer at Macromedia, highlights Macromedia's site relaunch. Of interest are a few links to behind the scenes reports on the site evaluation, development, and launch process. Much of what's in these reports is marketing fu, but there are a few technical nuggets. Of note is that Macromedia is now pushing a combination of Flash MX, Cold Fusion MX, and Web services as a platform for building Rich Internet Applications. Can you say Java Applets 1.0 in 2003 boys and girls?
However, between the penetration of Flash across a number of devices, and the relative quality and stability of the platform, Rich Internet Applications may succeed. The time may actually be right for this idea.
Sometimes life viciously taunts you. Being a big MovableType fan, it would have been cool to hear what the Trotss had to say. Especially since the event was just up the street from my office. Unfortunately, a "previous engagement" nixed my attendance. One of these days I'll get a mean streak and learn to cancel on people.
Networking--.
Apropos of nothing, other than the fact that I like big words, Mary Challender reports on 100 words that the editors of the American Heritage College Dictionary think every high school graduate should know.
After a quick scan, my guess would be that I could use about 90 in my writing without thinking. Another five to seven I'd have to look up just to make sure. Three to five I really do not know.
Or at least now I do.
What hath this lexicon wrought?
J. D. Lasica eloquently makes the case for an emergent swarm of non-professional digital journalists and their symbiosis with the mainstream professional media. Bottom line, he avoids the polar ends of the blogger-journalism debate.
Saul Hansell of the NY Times reports on AOL providing pop-up blocking software in AOL 8.0. Granted users have a choice, but if you had an "annoy/don't annoy" button, which state would you leave it in?
This just makes for one more decreasingly effective means of advertising on the Web. Depending on where you sit, your mileage does vary.
Memo to self: nice job avoiding NYTimes links up til now
Sam Ruby, a relatively popular weblogger, has some brief commentary on what type of traffic is supportable on what type of hardware. Both his site and Mark Pilgrim's are on the same commodity AMD hardware.
This will be a useful data point when I do my "advanced weblogging" segment for the New Media Capstone next quarter.
It's unclear what the heck Aizai has put together, but they call it a "tuner" of various sorts and it apparently has RSS under the covers. I'm guessing that it's essentially some ghoulash of RTSP, SMIL, and QuickTime for the streaming media parts, and RSS for the text and image distribution.
Memo to self: investigate further
Not particularly news to those who've actually listened to my feverish mutterings, but the big boys are now starting to take this Wi-Fi stuff seriously. Intel made a bunch of announcements regarding new chips for baking into mobile devices, and rollout collaborations with Hilton, McD's and Borders.
Alex de Halavias has submitted a proposal for a panel on blogging to the Internet Research Conference held by the Association of Internet Researchers. If it's accepted, all the more reason for me to attend.
Bonus nuggets: Alex mentions two other academic venues where blogging will be presented
Bill Kovach, as reported by Wayne Dawkins of the Hampton Daily Press, is encouraging journalists to start defining what is essential regarding their craft. Of particular interest to me are some essential principals put forth in this piece including an obligation to the truth, and loyalty to the readers. I'm thinking about means to simulate agent behavior in media ecosystems, but without a firm grounding of the foundations, a simulation is useless. This could be the teeniest start.
Memo to self: buy and read Kovach's book
Apple bumped Java up to 1.4.1 and provided tighter integration with Cocoa, among other things.
An up-to-date Java on Mac OS X: very tasty!!
Feebly trying to maintain hack credibility.
Actually, Shirky's essay is simply a manifesto for all of the stuff I've been running my mouth about for the last year or so. Computation is starting to be able to see communities. Let's develop some solid empirical evidence and design principles to make augmented communities more effective.
Memo to self: get around to doing the work
The FuzzyGroup cooked up a search engine for RSS feeds, called it Roogle, and promptly received a cease-and-desist letter from Google (I'm betting). Still the idea is sound and I bet there'll be a storm of work in this area shortly.
But I've been known to be wrong before.
Keep up to date with Roogle, er whatever it's called, at the RoogleBlog
Laura Castañeda reports on a workshop at the Poynter Institute regarding "Convergence for College Educators". There's only one point of hers that really stands out to me, and that's the admonition to not attempt the creation of "Super Reporters". However, the volume should have been pumped and the idea flipped to "Teams not Backpacks".
Actually, I'm also a big fan of the "Seek Geeks" point, but then that might be construed as self-serving.
Mizuko Ito (any relation to Joi?) checks into Japan Media Review with a first person account of how cell phones are changing group communication patterns in Japan. If you've read Rheingold's Smart Mobs this is just a reinforcement of some of the observations he presented.
Today's blogomet streaking through the sphere is "World of Ends", essentially Dave Reed's end-to-end argument as a marketing spiel for TooBusy CEOs and policy types.
Glad somebody did it.
That is all.
I'm a pathetic sports junkie.... Which is a great differentiator in Computer Science!! For example, how many of NU's CS faculty actually even know who Barry Bonds is?
Why does this matter? Sports is a big enough industry that lots of interesting technical things happen which never reach the attention of people who should know better. An example is USA Today's brilliant use of Web multimedia to illustrate how Barry Bonds hits a home run. The piece combines audio, video, still imagery, and interaction to engage in a sophisticated discussion of how a baseball hall of famer can do what he does.
Really, one of the best things I've seen on the Web in a long time. Betcha it never shows up on E-Media Tidbits.
In MIT's Technology Review, Duncan Watts expounds on the "new science of networks". It's a pretty high level piece, but reinforces the concept that what's really new these days is the convergence of disciplines on the topic of networks and emergence.
Memo to self: hunt down books by Watt mentioned in article
The J-Lab is a University of Maryland housed project for investigating, understanding, and supporting uses of technology in media for the public interest. Whew, that's a mouthful. In support of these goals, they've launched a contest, the Batten Awards, to highlight innovation in online journalism.
In any event, the whole shebang is run by the talented Jan Schaffer, who I've had the pleasure of meeting on occasion.
Memo to self: stop by J-Lab next time I visit home
Memo two self: win 2004 Batten Award
Noting the existence of IT & Society as a potential place to publish.
N.b. Ivory et. al. is something of a canard since Schneiderman and Lazar are listed ahead of her as special editors. But in a microuniverse moment, a large chunk of my graduate career at Berkeley overlapped with her. Ergo the reordering.
Memo to self: read contents of special issue and evaluate quality of venue
I have absolutetly no intention of intending (or attending as the case may be, as if anyone cared), but Jupiter is having a weblog conference. Way too business oriented for my goals and tastes.
In the cake and eat it too category, The Register reports on Linksys' combo 802.11[a,b,g] cards. The real kicker is the $99 retail price. Granted the quality will be typical Linksys bottom of the barrel, but damn, that's one convenient card at a good price.
Great minds think alike. Sterling Hughes' speculation is perilously close to what I'm trying to do with NusFlows (decloaking soon).
Brent Simmons, the author of my favorite RSS aggregator NetNewsWire, is interviewed on a number of topics including future RSS aggregators, potential alternative uses of RSS, and Cocoa programming.
Yet another RSS aggregator is spawned. Dare Obasanjo has published RssBandit through MSDN (Microsoft Developer Network). RssBandit is developed in C#. I wonder if source is available?
Memo to self: catalog aggregators to see if there's one per major platform that can be hijacked
Don't quite know what to make of Richards Interactive's "Project Blogger". At it's core the idea is swag for publicity. There are so many obvious reasons why this is wrong that it actually just might succeed.
Yes, I meant what I just wrote.
I'm on a panel today being run by Medill. A few journalists are on board, including Dan Gillmor.
Three quarters of the candidates in the past midterm national and gubernatorial elections had a web presence reports the Christian Science Monitor.
Wow!!
The scary thought is that the politicians may actually be ahead of the newspaper types.
Duncan Wilcox, who had previously done an analysis of Google's PageRank algorithm in the wild, takes a look at the latest version of PageRank, noting a distinct decrease in the impact of link topology. In particular, link text analysis, analysis of the text surrounding a link as an indicator of relevant topics, is becoming increasingly more important. He also includes some speculation regarding the meaning of the Google/Pyra deal.
Aside: Google and Pyra are still claiming that the deal is strictly out of Web benevolence. Hard to believe, although Google is still a private company. Altruism is possible if you don't have shareholders that you're beholden to.
Cool idea coming from Minolta. Using Minolta Messenger, a photographer can annotate a photo with text, that get's stashed in the image itself. Then the image can be e-mailed to a friend. A trial version of Messenger can be attached to the image, said version reverting to reading only after 14 days.
Sounds like a great idea just from it's utility, but even cooler from a viral marketing perspective. Microsoft is probably kicking themselves.
Wonder how long it will take for someone to reverse engineer it and then get sued by Minolta under the DMCA though?
The mission of NewsLab is as follows:
NewsLab is a non-profit resource for television newsrooms, focused on research and training. We serve local stations by helping them find better ways of telling important stories that are often difficult to convey on television.
Might be a good place to get tips on leveraging continuous media online.
Previously, I lamented about not having read Gladwell's "The Tipping Point" and Johnson's "Emergence". Thanks to some extended plane travel, I had copious time to knock them out. Both were quite interesting and I'm still digesting them.
In the meantime, it turns out Gladwell has a website with a section devoted to "The Tipping Point", but Johnson gets cool points for having his own weblog.
Memo to self: peruse previous reviews and blog my own critique and commentary
Looks like O'Reilly is going to produce a book on weblog hacks, according to Ben Hammersley. Looks a bit unfocused to me, but that's what editors are for.
Dave Winer loosens his lips to the fact that the next version of Microsoft FrontPage supports weblogging. If true, blogging will be highly enabled in the enterprise (I think you still get FrontPage with Office) and made much more accessible in the home. Microsoft's judicious adherence to the current set of standards (I wouldn't hold my breath) could mean an order of magnitude more weblog writers.
Positive: official stamp of approval on weblogging
Negatives: massive hype wave, impending embrace and extend
Position: reserved enthusiasm
The Online Journalism Review has launched a sister publication, Japan Media Review. The lead article is by Jan Stevens who I bumped into at an API seminar last year.
Mary Hodder documents interesting usage of Technorati.com to find weblog linkages, and even better, per item linkages.
Memo to self: dig into Technorati