New Media Hack

NMH: Milestones

2007-01-31T21:26:00-05:00

My third blogiversary came and went on Jan 18th.

This post is post 1500. Not bad for four year's worth of work. While I'm not huge into analysis, I'm pretty confident I've avoided padding this blog with a lot of personal fluff, status updates, and echo chambering. Despite that (and no comments), I'm still pretty high up on ego searches for my name and media hack.

And finally I completed my first full month with my new employer, Lockheed Martin Corporation (cf Sayonara, Evanston). I work in a small, Arlington, VA based divison of Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Labs. The gig involves much less basic science than a faculty position, a much bigger business development focus, and more time to concentrate on hacking up proof of concept technologies. And of course a tilt towards the military and intelligence communities. I'm having a lot of fun!!

Northwestern's been kind enough to provide me a courtesy adjunct appointment, which will expire in August, so you may see some winding down of this blog, and a slow migration to personal hosting, probably with a reduced technical focus. Then again I've said that before and not followed through. We'll see.

Ciao!!

NMH: Many Eyes Thoughts

2007-01-31T20:51:00-05:00

Obviously I have a great deal of admiration for Many Eyes, both the project and the folks behind it, many of whom I've met. Herewith, some minor suggestions and thoughts:

Echoing my same complaint about swivel, data without task is a hard sell job. Maybe they need a curator who authors interesting data exploration contests.
Having a viz distribution mechanism, ala YouTube video players, would be a major feature upgrade.
While discussion near a viz is great, a groundbreaking capability would be an elegant naming mechanism so you could point people to particular points in a visualization. A radical road to follow would take each viz as it's own little REST space, read only, from which URLs could be passed around. Other than the snapshot capability, there's really no good way to say, "Look at the viz here!".
Betcha there's prefuse inside.

Just thinking out loud.

Delbosc: plush

2007-01-31T20:03:00-05:00

PyLucene is the Rube Goldbergian combination of Python and Java Lucene. It gives you the core guts of a flexible, high performance, full text indexing engine in Python, but isn't very friendly to work with on an exploratory basis. Benoit Delbosc's plush is an initial crack at providing a nice interactive command line for PyLucene.

Horman & Butscher:

2007-01-31T19:34:00-05:00

Link parkin': WikidPad, a notebook/outliner for Windows. Open source with Python inside!

[Via Brian Carnell]

Gray: Missing At Sea

2007-01-29T22:15:00-05:00

In my second or third year at Cal, I took the grad database class with Michael Stonebraker. Adam Sah pulled a little stunt for our final exam and invited Jim Gray to show up and sit in the front row. Stonebraker's reaction was mildly entertaining. Whoever you are, Jim Gray has probably forgotten more about relational database management systems than you ever knew. Except maybe for Hector Garcia-Molina. Ha ha, only serious.

Werner Vogels reports that Jim Gray went sailing recently and hasn't been heard from. I only had a micro-moment with Gray, but I'm with Vogels praying for his safe return.

Ephemeral Security: Mosquito Lisp

2007-01-29T21:00:00-05:00

Link parkin': Mosquito Lisp

Mosquito Lisp is a network-oriented and compact Lisp with strong influence from Scheme. It is available as part of the Mosquito Remote Execution Framework distribution, and there is a Reference Manual.

A quick scan leaves a distinctly Erlangish flavor. Distributed security hacking in Scheme sounds entertaining.

Auer et. al: dbpedia

2007-01-29T20:09:00-05:00

No matter what you think of Wikipedia's quality, it's sort of cool that you can download the entire contents of Wikipedia. That's a whole lot of human generated text, mostly structured, mostly vetted, that motivated hackers can grovel over.

Enterprising German hackers Sören Auer, Chris Bizer, Richard Cyganiak, Jens Lehmann, and Georgi Kobilarov have put together dbpedia:

dbpedia.org is a community effort to extract structured information from Wikipedia and to make this information available on the Web. dbpedia allows you to ask sophisticated queries against Wikipedia and to link other datasets on the Web to Wikipedia data.

Basically they've extracted a couple of decent sized datasets of well structured information nodes from Wikipedia, e.g. music albums, city entries, and put Semantic Web search on top. You get some pretty powerful query capabilities out of this.

I don't hang with this crowd, but seems to me that Wikipedia snapshots would make great grist for web mining and text mining folks.

Carter, et. al: Iraq Fallen Viz

2007-01-28T14:42:00-05:00

Shan Carter, Aron Pilhofer, Andy Lehren, and Jeff Damens of The New York Times put together an impressive multimedia interactive on fallen US soldiers in Iraq. This is a nice example of combining interactive visualizations and infographics so that a user can "drill down" into data without having to lose a bunch of context.

A key component is the adjustable/slidable window, which is reminiscent of Oliver Steele's expialidocio.us. Wonder where Oliver wandered off too?

[Via infoesthetics]

Ippolito: simplejson

2007-01-28T14:32:00-05:00

JSON is a format increasingly emitted by web services, being fairly lightweight, flexible, and cross-language. Bob Ippolito's simplejson is a pure Python JSON toolkit:

simplejson is a simple, fast, complete, correct and extensible JSON encoder/decoder for Python 2.3+. It is pure Python code with no dependencies. simplejson 1.5 is a major update that provides better Python 2.5 and Windows compatibility, and two new features that control encoding (indent for pretty-printing, and separators for generating optimally compact JSON)

Good to have in the toolbox!

Holovaty & Kaplan-Moss: Django Book

2007-01-28T14:20:00-05:00

It's 2007 and Apress is scheduled to ship a book on Django. But if you can't wait, you can read beta chapters of the Django Book online.

Greene: Digg Viz

2007-01-28T14:11:00-05:00

Not a whole lot of meat, but Kate Greene's article on Digg's use of visualization to combat gaming indicates that their tools could have some upside. However, the article doesn't clearly portray anyone from Digg as signing on to this notion. It's mostly Stamen Design talking about stuff they developed. Interesting numbers on story submissions and number of diggs/votes processed though.

[Via SmartMobs]

Sampson & Clapper: rawdog & curn

2007-01-26T20:37:00-05:00

LInk parkin': I was doing my bimonthly search for pieces of the Emacs of Aggregators (TM) and ran across:

rawdog:

rawdog is an RSS Aggregator Without Delusions Of Grandeur. Written in Python, it uses Mark Pilgrim's feed parser to read RSS 0.9, 1.0, 2.0, CDF and Atom feeds. It runs from cron, collects articles from a number of feeds, and generates a static HTML page listing the newest articles in date order. It supports per-feed customisable update times, and uses ETags, Last-Modified, and gzip compression to minimise network bandwidth usage.

curn:

Unlike many RSS readers, curn does not use a graphical user interface. It is a command-line utility, intended to be run periodically in the background by a command scheduler such as cron(8) (on Unix-like systems) or the Windows Scheduler Service (on Windows).

Rawdog is conveniently written in Python, but curn's plug-in mechanism looks more polished, taking advantage of Java metaprogramming. If you just want to monitor a pile of feeds and don't need megascale performance, these might be a good place to start.

CIIR & alias-i: Lemur & LingPipe

2007-01-26T20:05:00-05:00

Link parkin': Two text mining toolkits:

Lemur:

The Lemur Toolkit is a open-source toolkit designed to facilitate research in language modeling and information retrieval. Lemur supports a wide range of industrial and research language applications such as ad-hoc retrieval, site-search, and text mining.

LingPipe:

LingPipe is a suite of Java libraries for the linguistic analysis of human language.

Lemur is bleeding edge research grade stuff, while LingPipe is a stable commercial product.

Colburn: Snap! Followup

2007-01-26T20:00:00-05:00

Rafe Colburn, also on the "-1 Snap Previews" bandwagon, got some interesting commentary on a blog post regarding the issue, including how end users can opt out of the previews and a couple of other strategies for defeating the pesky popups. Apparently, it's a bit trickier for publishers though.

Also serves to remind me to subscribe to the rc3 webfeed.

[Via Scripting News]

Machhausen: Feed'N Read

2007-01-25T22:03:00-05:00

Aggregator++: Feed'N Read is an open source, Java/Eclipse based RSS aggregator. Yet another option for potential aggregator hacks. Plus there's always BlogBridge

Snap: -1 Previews

2007-01-25T21:24:00-05:00

Along with quite a few other folks, I can't stand the usage of Snap previews. I have yet to hit one of these where I can actually read the little preview, in essence obfuscating the destination!!

-1 on usability.

Hammersley: MT Atom Support

2007-01-25T21:12:00-05:00

According to Ben Hammersley et. al.'s book, Hacking Movable Type, MT already supports the Atom publishing protocol. Hold the train on moving to WordPress.

Nolan: EarthSLOT

2007-01-24T22:49:00-05:00

Digging around for information on Google Earth, I ran across the EarthSLOT project:

EarthSLOT is a collection of 3D GIS and terrain visualization applications designed to allow scientists, resource managers, educators, and the public better understand our planet and the earth science that goes on here.

...

Our mission at EarthSLOT is to advance earth science and earth science education through the use of on-line 3D terrain visualization and GIS tools. This technology is improving at a rapid pace, as more 3D engines come on-line and more developers begin using them. What seems to be lacking in the community right now is a site that hosts applications from various engines, reviews the technology, and discusses their strengths and weakness in regards to earth science and earth science education. Our goal, therefore, is to serve as this repository and forum for 3D applications that advance earth science and earth science education using any 3D software engines.

Mike Nolan also has a good overview of some 3D geospatial engines, including Google Earth.

Ortega-Ruiz: emacs hacks

2007-01-24T22:36:00-05:00

Link parkin: minor emacs wizardry, a well written blog of emacs and elisp hacking.

Flickr: Machine Tags

2007-01-24T22:24:00-05:00

Flickr has a new extension to their tagging mechanism: machine tags. As far as I can see, it's a minor extension to the tagging syntax, allowing for a colon separated prefix and then keyword/value pair separated by an =, e.g bmd:some=value. All the real action though is in the fact that Flickr's search API actually leverages the machine tags for more sophisticated queries. Seems like a slow drift towards the semantic web.

Mullenweg: WordPress Atom

2007-01-23T21:07:00-05:00

Tantalizingly, Matt Mullenweg teases Atom API support in WordPress 2.2. Now that might get me to reconsider WordPress for my next blogging platform.

Miller: MacFUSE Spotlight Folders

2007-01-23T21:00:00-05:00

Link parkin': A Macintosh filesystem where accessing folders generates queries to Spotlight, Apple's desktop search service. Written completely at user level using MacFUSE.

As predicted, there are all sorts of fun tricks that can be pulled with user level file systems and builtin Mac OS X services.

IBM VCL: Many Eyes

2007-01-23T20:46:00-05:00

Following up on my admiration for their Communication-Minded Visualization manifesto, Martin Wattenberg , Fernanda Viégas, and the rest of their compatriots at IBM's Visual Communication Lab have launched Many Eyes. Many Eyes is the concrete manifestation of the themes in their manifesto:

Many Eyes is a bet on the power of human visual intelligence to find patterns. Our goal is to "democratize" visualization and to enable a new social kind of data analysis.

Similar to swivel, the site supports the upload of data sets, generation of visualizations from those data sets, and discussion around the visualizations. The main difference is that Many Eyes has quite a bit different set of non-traditional visualizations.

I'm betting there'll be some interesting research papers to come out of this.

[Via Tim O'Reilly]

Fowler: Dabble DB Plugin API

2007-01-22T23:47:00-05:00

A few years ago, I pondered the possibility of pluggable web applications, invoking St. Graham to solve the problem. As described by Chad Fowler, looks like Dabble, the Web DB, has taken a good stab at a web app plug-in mechanism. The gist is to plug-out, shipping off plain old CSV text to a URL, and receiving CSV in return. There must be some trickiness in avoiding DOS attacks, intentional or unintentional, but it's probably a bit easier than dealing with sandboxed code.

[Via Simon Willison]

Kantor: Streampad

2007-01-22T23:24:00-05:00

From Paul Lamere:

Streampad is a web music player. Its not just a music player that plays in your browser. Its a music player that plays the web.

...

Streampad can also be used to give you access to your own music collection when you are on the road. Streampad has a little server that runs on your computer that will serve up your music collection so whereever you are you can listen to your home music collection. For those of us that have terrabyte-sized music collections that don't fit on an iPod or a laptop.

Streampad is another example of the universal music player - it lets you play music from any source - helping you to play your music where ever you are (as long as you are connected to the web).

Streampad is currently a one man mission of Dan Kantor, formerly of del.icio.us.

By the by, Lamere's Duke Listen's! is a good read.

Frisch: Nostalgy

2007-01-21T20:27:00-05:00

Alain Frisch's Nostalgy plug-in makes filing e-mail messages in Thunderbird a snap from the keyboard.

Skrenta: Blogging

2007-01-21T19:28:00-05:00

Maybe it's because I've been following NU alum Rich Skrenta's company, Topix.Net, but it just seems to me like he's been blogging forever. However, he launched another blog in mid December so he could stretch out on some topics, and he's doing a great job. Well worth the addition to your aggregator.

WWW2007: Workshops

2007-01-21T18:01:00-05:00

An interesting menu of workshops is being offered as part of this year's International World Wide Web Conference. Weblogs have moved off onto their own conference, but there's a second edition of the tagging workshop, along with others on socially constructed knowledge, query log analysis, and IPTV. Also, the conference location is Banff, Canada which I've heard is quite scenic.

Kipp & Campbell: DIU Tagging Patterns

2007-01-15T23:33:00-05:00

The abstract from Margaret Kipp and Grant Campbell's, "Patterns and Inconsistencies in Collaborative Tagging Systems:An Examination of Tagging Practices (PDF)"

This paper analyzes the tagging patterns exhibited by users of del.icio.us, to assess how collaborative tagging supports and enhances traditional ways of classifying and indexing documents. Using frequency data and co-word analysis matrices analyzed by multi-dimensional scaling, the authors discovered that tagging practices to some extent work in ways that are continuous with conventional indexing. Small numbers of tags tend to emerge by unspoken consensus, and inconsistencies follow several predictable patterns that can easily be anticipated. However, the tags also indicated intriguing practices relating to time and task which suggest the presence of an extra dimension in classification and organization, a dimension which conventional systems are unable to facilitate.

Hmmm, sounds like they might have discovered some of the interesting effects I found when looking at Flickr (PDF), but I'll have to read the full paper. Maybe, I should look at applying their techniques to my old data.

[Via search engine land]

Yang: Nginx vs. Lighttpd

2007-01-15T23:20:00-05:00

Nice comparison by Scott Yang of two lighweight http servers, nginx and lighttpd, for when Apache is a bit on the heavy side.

Singh: MacFUSE

2007-01-15T23:14:00-05:00

Link parkin': Google hacker Amit Singh releases MacFUSE, allowing you to write file system hacks in user level code on the Macintosh.

Combine with the Mac's powerful, uniform application scripting and other automation tools for powerful effect, e.g. make blog posting as easy as dropping a file in a folder.

Linden: Findory Sunsetted

2007-01-15T23:07:00-05:00

Foo. Looks like Findory will be riding off into the sunset. I originally pooh poohed Findory's core concept but over time came to appreciate its utility, not to mention Greg Linden's wonderfully blogging about the whole process. Hopefully one day Greg will write up and publish some of his experience and techniques.

Hmmmm, maybe he should have been a bit more ruthless, although we'd all be the worse for it.

Apache: Solr

2007-01-15T22:42:00-05:00

Neato. Solr is an Apache incubator project that turns Lucene into an enterprise search server. The cool thing about Solr is that it has an exceedingly pleasant RESTful web services api. To quote the FAQ:

Solr itself is a Java Application, but all interaction with Solr is done by POSTing XML messages over HTTP (to index documents) and GETing search results back as XML, or a variety of other formats (JSON, Python, Ruby, etc...)

Cross platform. Flexible, powerful, extensible, full text search. Easy to program aginst. What's not to like?

PNNL: InfoViz Tech

2007-01-09T00:40:00-05:00

Link parkin': Pacific Northwest National Laboratory's varied visualization technologies.

Baumgart, et. al: OverSim

2007-01-09T00:30:00-05:00

A talented team of German researchers is developing OverSim, a framework for doing simulations of overlay networks. Overlay network techniques, as canonically exhibited by Gnutella, are a foundation of academic P2P research. Of course you'd like to try out your protocols and applications before you cut something loose on the real Internet.

Mehta: Tagline Generator

2007-01-09T00:09:00-05:00

Chirag Mehta's PHP based Tagline Generator is a handy little tool. This should remind folks that you can have tag clouds without necessarily having tagging.

Probably a pretty straightforward Python port.

bard: xmpp4moz

2007-01-09T00:02:00-05:00

Not just the Jabber messaging protocol embedded in your web browser, but a whole philosophy and suite of applications built on top. Sort of like a radically open source KnowNow before they went all enterprisey on us.

[Via the l. m. orchard del.icio.us feed]

James: RESTful DIU API

2007-01-08T23:48:00-05:00

Link parkin': Paul James takes the del.icio.us API and makes it truly RESTful.

Debatty: VJ Culture Book

2007-01-07T23:44:00-05:00

Since I've revealed that I'm a lapsed DJ, some of my noodlings about music and tech might start to make more sense. Looks like I'll have to pick up Michael Faulkner's "Audio-Visual Art and VJ Culture" eloquently reviewd by Régine Debatty. I'm particularly interested in the hw/sw combos these folks use, which the book covers, plus you get a bigass 130 minute DVD to boot.

merholz: AskCity Doesn't Suck

2007-01-06T00:14:00-05:00

Peter Merholz, aka peterme, demonstrates some of the interesting features of AskCity. AskCity is Ask.com's local search tool said tool making heavy usage of maps for information presentation. AskCity takes online maps as media artifacts to a new level, presenting an interesting challenge to Google and Yahoo!.

Jones: Linux Virtualization Overview

2007-01-05T00:53:00-05:00

Link parkin': nice accessible overview of the current state of Linux virtualization by M. Tim Jones.

Shivakumar: Google Kirkland Action

2007-01-05T00:52:00-05:00

According to Narayanan Shivakumar, those Googlers at the relatively new Kirkland, WA labs have been quite productive hackers (PDF):

Since then we've attracted many engineers who were tickled silly about working on large clusters of several thousands of machines, not to mention shipping web and client-based consumer apps used by millions of people. In the last two years, our Kirkland engineering team has conceived and launched a dozen products ranging from core search product improvements to Ads Optimization, Sitemaps and Webmaster Central, plus such consumer applications as Google Talk, Chat, Pack, Video, Music Trends, and mobile SMS.

Singh: diu to CSE

2007-01-04T23:48:00-05:00

You can automatically turn your del.icio.us bookmarks into a Google Custom Search Engine using Vik Singh's whizzy web application. Nice hack!!

[Via Google Blogscoped]

Linden: Findory API

2007-01-04T23:41:00-05:00

Greg LInden reports that the Findory web services API has been greatly expanded. To quote Greg, "In fact, there is enough here in the new Findory API that, with a database for caching data and for remembering reader's histories, you pretty much could build your own version of Findory with it."

Now to find time to do something interesting with it.

Palmer: Vienna, Open Source Aggregator

2007-01-03T23:58:00-05:00

Link parkin': Steve Palmer's Vienna RSS Aggregator. Mac OS X only, but it could be The Emacs of Aggregators (TM).

[Via 0xDECAFBAD]

Kosara: Hanrahan Influences

2007-01-03T23:49:00-05:00

Robert Kosara is collecting lists of influences from distinctive leaders in the visualization community. His first subject is Pat Hanrahan, who provides a very interesting list of influential texts. I agree with Kosara: "if you don't know who he is, you better find out."

Google: Reader Trends

2007-01-03T22:59:00-05:00

I wonder if it's an experiment, but I was offered a trend view of my aggregator reader habits in Google Reader. Things presented:

Active and inactive feeds by items per day.
Reading, starring, and sharing activity on a per feed basis
A tag cloud, generated from your tagged feeds, highlighting tags by items appearing (size) and items read (shade).

Kewl!! One of the nice things about this personalized view, is that it becomes quite easy to prune inactive feeds. A small win in the fight against information overload, but a win nonetheless. Now if they'd only provide some per blogroll search capabilities.

Lin: Winamp in Python

2006-12-29T23:34:00-05:00

Wei Lin's Python Cookbook recipe uses Python's ctype module to hijack winamp plug-ins and build a micro MP3 player using standard Python 2.5. Nice hack!

NMH: GReader API?

2006-12-29T23:22:00-05:00

Okay GReader guys. It's been over a year now since you were sussed by Niall Kennedy. That's more than enough burn-in for your internal API. I think it's pretty clear it works fine. Write the docs, open the doors, and get it over with. Real artists ship!

NMH: Tagged

2006-12-29T23:10:00-05:00

Guess I'm in the blog tag club, Greg Linden called "you're it" on me.

Since, I'm going to run off at the mouth, let me get to the five folks I'm tagging: Dan Ciruli (Go Bears!!), Alex Halavais, Josh Lucas, Adrian Holovaty, Lucas Gonze

Here's five things you probably couldn't discern just by reading this blog. Apologies for being a bit more expansive than most, but I'm in a divulging mood. More after the break:

1) MIT's Walker Memorial Hall provided two formative experiences. First, as a freshman, I bussed tables in the dining hall to make some spending money. My family had just enough resources to pay the tuition, room and board, but I had to come up with my own party dough. Second, I did a hip-hop show on Walker Memorial Basement Radio (WMBR) called "The Dope Jamz", in that prime spot of 11:00 PM on Friday nights. My partner, and the real instigator, was Philadelphian Larry McKay, aka DJ Chameleon, self-described friend of Jazzy Jeff and acquaintance of Will, Fresh Prince, Smith. Chameleon always claimed that Smith did get into MIT but wasn't "all that."

2) House music is my listening form of choice, particularly DJ mixes. Concurrent with being a big hip hop head in the late 80's, I caught an even worse house music bug. In parallel with hip-hop, house and Detroit techno were exploding in the northeast US. When I got to UC Berkeley in '89, the rave scene blew up and sucked me in. I still have a pair of Technics SL 1200's, a couple of Stanton cartridges, a mixer, a lot of now classic 12" vinyl, and know how to use them. For a while, under the watchful eyes of Rob Doten, I got to abuse the tables at the now defunct Primal Records store, a central East Bay DJ hangout. Brush with greatness: Curtis A. Jones, aka Cajmere/Green Velvet did one year of chemical engineering grad school at Berkeley, before launching his recording career. We used to frequent a lot of late night SF SOMA (pre-ballpark) spots together.

3) I was a passable ultimate frisbee player, never quite being serious or athletic enough to join a "real" open team, but always being a solid grinder and role player. At the hat tournament, I was the guy who would make a couple of big plays, throw to the rookies, and wouldn't complain about PT. When I was at the top of my game, I mainly played coed before coed was cool. Peak moments were playing C bracket finals on a Sunday at Potlatch 1996, rushing to SEA-TAC, flying a redeye back to New York, going to work, and then playing in the Westchester Ultimate Summer League, which featured some of the best players in the country, followed by the 2001 Monkey Foo tournament in Grenoble, France. I was in the best shape of my life, my team, the Geneva Wizards won the spirit award, and my flight back from that trip landed on September 10th. I also played in 10 Hats, Hops, and Hucks.

4) I was a barista at Nefeli Cafe in Berkeley, CA for a little over a year, surrounded on either side by a couple of years of steady patronage. I caught the cafe bug a few years earlier in Berkeley, and to this day I am a complete cafe slut, doing my best to scout out coffee shops in whatever cities I visit. I don't think Pascal, one of Nefeli's two Greek owners, took to me until we had a spot inspection by an Illy coffee supervisor, we might have been the only place serving Illy coffee in Berkeley at the time, and I managed to make a cappucino to his satisfaction. Creamy not frothy foam!!

5) I'm a bit of a sports junkie. Not a rabid sports fan, but my background noise of choice is sports talk radio and ESPN. I freely admit that this is a harmless, but horrible vice. I think the seed was planted by my dad listening to Ken Beatrice (YOOAH, NEXT!) but I got really hooked on KNBR. Heck, I even enjoy Jim Rome's radio show, a very acquired taste. The only show I had to give up on was Scott Ferrall's KNBR travesty. God was that unlistenable.

Shaw: Semester Recap

2006-12-22T23:52:00-05:00

Berkeley, Greece, Santa Barbara, Vancouver, and Honolulu?. Not to mention fun sounding courses like Practical Machine Learning and Online Journalism. Boy, those Cal graduate students have hard lives. Back in my day, we were lucky to get trips to Toronto, Seattle and Albequerque!

Ha, ha. Only serious.

Lucas: Merry Linkdumps

2006-12-22T23:44:00-05:00

Good recent linkdumps [1],[2],[3] from Josh Lucas. Good stuff on web app architecture and search, not to mention the bonus collaborative filtering links.

Memo to Josh. I'll take LSU -whatever. Bowls with Notre Dame haven't been particularly pretty.

Richter, et. al.: Multi-Scale Timeline Sliders

2006-12-22T23:27:00-05:00

This old Georgia Tech visualization paper looks worth a read, especially given the boom in online audio and video:

We present a new user interface technique for the visualization and playback of long media streams decorated with significant events. Our Multi-Scale Timeline Slider allows users to precisely focus on a specific location in a very long media stream or set of streams based on significant events while also retaining the stream's entire context. KEYWORDS: Timeline slider control, multimedia streams, visualization, focus + context.

Authors: Heather A. Richter, Jason A. Brotherton, Gregory D. Abowd, Khai N. Truong

Via TomC's linklist

O'Sullivan: Collab Filtering Made Easy

2006-12-22T23:16:00-05:00

I swiped the title of Bryan O'Sullivan's blog post on doing collaborative filtering in 40 lines of code with Python. Moby hack!

Usher: libsna

2006-12-20T22:05:00-05:00

Link parkin': Abe Usher's libsna, which is a social network analysis library built on top of networkx.

I think Usher's claim of "libSNA is the premier open source library for conducting social network analysis (SNA) research," is trumped by JUNG.

NMH: An Underrated Device?

2006-12-20T19:52:00-05:00

You may have noticed I had some Copious Spare Time (TM) recently, although that's fast changing. In any event, I spent some of that time playing with my PSP, a device that I have previously equated with a PARCTab. In that time, I upgraded my PSP with a 2GB Memory Stick. I've had a lot of fun throwing tons of media on it and using the PSP like an oversized iPod. Note though that said "iPod" has two forms of removable media (Memory Stick and UMD), not to mention built-in WiFi. And in exchange for the size differential, you actually get pretty good battery life when using the WiFi, which normally sucks with PDA-like devices.

I also discovered that my PSP headphones also serve as a little remote control. Combined with the multitude of game playing controls onboard, the PSP would make a great platform for developing ubicomp systems and applications.

Unfortunately, I spoke too soon about being open to development. The one tool I pointed to, Adventure Maker really just creates HTML browser applications, and makes them easily accessible to the built-in PSP browser. Not a trivial achievement, but a pretty low ceiling. Apparently there are actually sophisticated tools and middleware for the PSP, but you have to be a licensed PSP developer to get a hold of them. I'm guessing that this is not an easy trick, and impossible if you can't demonstrate a multimillion dollar revenue stream for Sony.

I wonder, however, if a resarch group teamed with a previously licensed developer could make any headway. Hmmmmm....

I guess the fallback is the rich internet application route, depending on how well the PSP browser supports DHTML and/or Flash.

Pulver: Blog-Tag

2006-12-20T19:27:00-05:00

No, I haven't been tagged, a phenomenon seemingly started by Jeff Pulver, although there are hints that he was at least inspired by an existing wave of the game.

But, I note it as another challenge for all those blogosphere/social network analysis/search/social media hackers and researchers out there. Show me the shape of this blog tag network (tree?) and give me a picture of its dynamic growth. All the data's out there! This one'e even easier in that folks are putting explicit links in their posts.

Wodtke, Pind, Pollas &, Arthur: PublicSquare

2006-12-14T23:51:00-05:00

PublicSquare is a new (to me) hosted CMS/publishing system, which looks like it might be a good fit for IT strapped journalism groups (read school projects). Incorporates workflow and community management features from the ground up.

Heer, et. al.: prefuse gallery

2006-12-14T23:39:00-05:00

Jeff Heer's prefuse toolkit just keeps getting better. There's a couple of new vizzes in the gallery that I hadn't noticed. Heer wrote a new viz of congressional spending, reworked the baby NameVoyager, and also reimplemented Ben Fry's zipdecode processing app. Warning, heavyweight Java applets at the end of those links. Also, Doantam Phan used prefuse to implement flowmaps.

Dayley: Python Phrasebook

2006-12-14T23:28:00-05:00

I was wondering what was in Brad Dayley's Python Phrasebook. TechBookReport has a brief review, but it looks like a handy collection of Python idioms across a number of tasks. Could be useful.

Rubel: BillG Blogger Fest

2006-12-14T23:22:00-05:00

Steve Rubel and a few other influential bloggers received an audience with Bill Gates.

I can see the post germinating in Seth Finkelstein's mind even as I type this. He's convinced this Z- lister that there's a new set of gatekeepers. However, I never bought into the blogging triumphalism, so I'm not that broken up about the situation. I normally wouldn't comment but this just seemed like the punctuation to his riff. Besides, discerning new media consumers need to keep the new/old context in mind.

Not to mention the whole Arrington, Jarvis, Winer, Denton, Calacanis, Denton, scrum. At least they're entertaining gatekeepers.

Pinckard: XNA Game Devkit

2006-12-12T23:03:00-05:00

Game Girl Advance reports on Microsoft's XNA Game Studio Express development platform for the Xbox 360, and an Ars Technica article has more details from a programmer's view. Basically you can develop on an XP desktop box and deploy over an Xbox 360 subscription network. The fees aren't trivial but aren't outrageous. Low cost enough that some enterprising computer clubs or informal youth media groups could cook up something interesting.

This could also be a vehicle for some interesting research based, software development platforms. The Chicago Python User Group already kicked around the idea of using some form of Python for building apps.

Paul: Firefox 3.0 Overview

2006-12-12T22:41:00-05:00

Ars Technica's Ryan Paul summarizes some things to look for in the upcoming Firefox 3.0. Looks like the big push is on incorporating Cairo for graphics rendering and improved standards support. Here's hoping someone works on the resource consumption. Firefox typically requires an order of magnitude more virtual memory and resident memory than any other application I use. And I'm an Emacs bigot!!

Hurst: ICWSM Update

2006-12-12T22:29:00-05:00

Matthew Hurst is on the program committee for the inaugural International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, and reports that the ICWSM submissions were numerous and of high quality.

Finin: Blog Influence

2006-12-11T23:35:00-05:00

Tim Finin of UMBC is hinting that his group at UMBC has developed a new model of blog influence, with published results forthcoming. Looks like they employ some social network analysis and a nuanced view of social roles in the network. Combined with their previous work on splogs, this could turn out interesting.

[Via Steve Rubel]

Adl-Tabatabai, Kozyrakis, & Saha: Transactional Memory

2006-12-11T23:27:00-05:00

Multicore programming is the wave of the future, that's what those Intel Duo (and other chips) enable, allowing for lots of concurrent operations radically improving performance. But programming with concurrency is hard. A potential aid to programmers in dealing with concurrency is transactional memory. This good article in ACM Queue, provides a nice high-level overview of transactional memory, including pros, cons and alternatives.

[Via Lambda the Ultimate]

Norvig: Google Research Videos

2006-12-11T23:07:00-05:00

20 videos of invited talks given at Google, as selected by Peter Norvig and I assume others in Google Research. The videos cover a broad range of topics from chimp research, to Google history, to Python, to large distributed systems.

Udell: Moving to MS

2006-12-10T12:54:00-05:00

Jon Udell is moving from InfoWorld to Microsoft. His blog coordinates are moving from his long standing site, to a new personal location, for a short term sabbatical.

NVAC: Illuminating the Path

2006-12-09T22:51:00-05:00

NVAC stands for the National Visualization and Analytics Center, a consortium of research groups interested in visual analytics for homeland security. About two years ago the organization produced a manifesto, "Illuminating the Path", to advance the state of the art in visual analytics. I haven't completely waded through the PDFs of the report, but at least the executive summary (PDF) makes for interesting reading. There's also a nine minute video about the production of the report, embedded in the page.

[Via Ramana Rao's linkfeed (RSS)]

Magnetk, LLC: SFTPDrive

2006-12-09T22:32:00-05:00

Link parkin': On Windows, SFTPDrive mounts remote filesystems using SFTP. Secure, cross platform, very convenient, probably worth the $39.

[Via Jeremy Zawodny's linkfeed (RSS)]

Kosara: Square Pie Chart

2006-12-09T22:26:00-05:00

Digging through the EagerEyes archive, Robert Kosara demonstrates the little known square pie chart. I am not joking. Think pizza sliced square versus "normal" cutting. Kosara convincingly shows how a square pie chart makes it much easier to read the raw magnitude of a statistic.

Another thing that's apparent from the discussion, under the assumption that the graphics are on the same scale, these charts support comparison quite well. Magnitude directly maps to area. Square pie charts also strike me as a fairly flexible basis for an interactive visualization, being pretty straightforward to generate, scalable, and quite button like.

Kosara: EagerEyes

2006-12-08T22:41:00-05:00

Link parkin: EagerEyes looks like a good blog and collection of resources regarding visualization.

[Via Tom Carden's linkfeed]

GTP Solutions: Feeds 2.0

2006-12-08T22:26:00-05:00

Speaking of aggregators and information overload, GTP Solutions' Feeds 2.0 would seem to be the uber synthesis of many of the themes I reiterate:

Feeds 2.0 utilizes an advanced computational intelligence personalization learning engine. With personalization the system ranks the feeds according to sources a particular user likes, authors and topics he's interested in, and brings interesting articles first. These are ranked by a score the system has assigned based on what has learned about the user's preferences. The system creates a dynamic profile of the topics the user likes and the sources he reads most. It actually begins to learn immediately from the first couple of clicks in order to figure out the user's preferences but obviously the more he uses it the better it gets.

It even allegedly does item clustering.

Pretty ambitious. With all the moving parts, I wonder if it actually works.

Linderman: Taming RSS

2006-12-08T22:21:00-05:00

A fresh wave of angst regarding webfeed information overload seems to be rippling through the blogsphere again. 37Signals' Mark Linderman proposes a couple of broad ways of filtering feeds: relying on publishers, relying on community, relying on friends, relying on a smarter client aggregator. The extensive comments on Linderman's post are worthy of examination as well.

From reading these types of discussions for a few years, I have one observation and one comment. The observation is that there are quite observable variations in behavior for both publishing and reading. Rigorously academic study to come up with some usefully discrete points in the spectrum would be a good project. Thus, you can immediately dismiss statements of the form, "The solution to information overload is...". Well no, there is no singular solution. Any solution is really dependent on a reader's context.

My comment is that folks almost uniformly focus on filtering, or reducing the amount of content delivered. Assume that feeling overloaded is the normal state and can never be eliminated. There's always too much stuff. Then wouldn't devising new ways of organizing, presenting, and navigating the deluge be an easier pursuit of larger benefit? Besides, throwing stuff away might be harmful, potentially eliminating larger contextual signals.

I'll also argue that overload is normal because most people are always irrationally afraid that they will "miss" something, even though they can never get a guarantee they won't. To compensate, they subscribe to "too many" sources. Also, having many sources increases the potential for serendipity, which is another effect innately sought after.

Kirkpatrick: Feed Workflow

2006-12-08T00:02:00-05:00

Link parkin': Backgrounder on how Marshall Kirkpatrick managed his feed reading while working for TechCrunch. I didn't think it was particularly deep, but there's a couple of interesting nuggets to be had.

Swivel: Social Infoporn

2006-12-07T23:51:00-05:00

Matthew Hurst is pretty excited about Swivel. According to Swivel's about page, "Swivel is a Web site for curious people to explore data." They also have a cute overview of the site.

In general, I'm of a like mind with Hurst, and I'm on record advocating social visualization as an interesting research direction. However, datasets and graphs unmoored from any particular purpose or activity doesn't seem all that often useful. Besides, it's hard enough finding visual insights within a dataset much less across them, which Swivel touts as a feature.

In short, I'm not hopeful for Swivel's success, but I'd be quite happy to be proven wrong.

Owen: JointRadio

2006-12-07T23:35:00-05:00

Link parkin': JointRadio: "A mashup of bookmarks, mp3 files, rss, a flashplayer".

Hopefully MP3 blogging and other Web musical activities can carry XSPF, which just reached version 1.0, into the dominant standard for playlists, including video playlists. Plus, I just think the XSPF players are quite neat hacks, very "of the web".

[Via Lucas Gonze]

Reifman: GPL NewsCloud

2006-12-07T23:22:00-05:00

NewsCloud's Jeff Reifman announces that the source for the social news platform is freely available under GPL. This is another codebase an entrepreneurial newsroom could cheaply exploit.

Lamere: Findory Fixations

2006-12-06T16:53:00-05:00

I have to pile onto Findory with Paul Lamere. Sometimes Findory seems to get fixated on certain things and keep recommending them. For me it's not topics so much as sources. I don't want to name names, but I can easily rattle off 5 feeds that Findory keeps recommending items from, mabye even all the items, leading to a defacto subscription. I've clicked through to these sources once if at all, months ago, and can tell from the item summaries I'm not going to take further suggestions any time soon.

It's not that big a problem, since I don't have to do any work to ignore these items. I get my Findory suggestions as a custom RSS feed. On the other hand there's got to be a tiny incremental cost to suggesting unwanted things that adds up over time. Wonder if anyone in the recommender community has examined the cost of poor recommendations other than a minimal, "people didn't use our system until our recommendations didn't suck," effect.

On the third hand, I imagine it has to be tricky to take user input for this problem and yet prevent users from blowing their foot off.

Bergmark: Collection Building

2006-12-06T16:10:00-05:00

My encounter with Nalanda hints at a focused crawling effort within the digital libraries community I haven't examined deeply enough. For example, Cornell's Donna Bergmark ran an extended collection building project that used the classic Mercator web crawler. Collection building aims to automatically build high quality, topic specific portals for online libraries. The group generated some interesting results, including a literature review of collection building (PDF).

As an addendum, Heritrix looks like the open source succesor to Mercator, possibly the first openly, documented high performance web crawler.

Menezes: Interactive Focused Crawling

2006-12-06T15:21:00-05:00

While I enjoyed reading Soumen Chakrabarti's papers on focused crawling papers, I never got a sense of the dirty details needed to implement such a crawler. I couldn't quite grok the iVia Nalanda source either. The MTech thesis (PDF) of Roger Menezes, a Chakrabarti student, revealed a little more to me. The thesis also explores the potential for "desktop scale" focused crawlers. This interests me because I have a hunch that tagging and aggregators could serve as good mechanisms for interacting with a personal focused crawler.

Johnny's Brain: GReader Tips

2006-12-06T15:08:00-05:00

Being a new GReader convert, I'm on the lookout for various hacks to improve the reading experience. Johnny's Brain has some useful tips and tricks, including a slick GreaseMonkey hack that adds a little indicator to sites if you've subscribed to them in GReader.

NMH: GooTube + Ads

2006-12-05T19:27:00-05:00

Just thinking out loud based on the allegation that pre and post roll advertising on Web videos won't fly. Wouldn't a Google class problem be, using organic metadata only, place new forms of advertising within the actual video? Automatically identify good cut points, come up with a new unobtrusive interface to alert viewers to sexy comm...er...potentially useful information, invent a few compatible, yet effective ad forms, and develop a new economy for contextual ad placement.

And of course, do it all at Web scale.

Think of it as AdSense for Web videos.

I'm not sayin', I'm just sayin'.

NMH: GReader v Bloglines

2006-12-05T19:07:00-05:00

The battle is over. In this theater, Google Reader has won the day.

In Bloglines' favor:

Visible feed subscriber counts
Automatically picks up redirected feeds better (I think)
Autorefresh works better, the subs panel and items view stay in sync automatically
Integrated search

In GReader's favor:

No phantom saved items
Starring is sweet
Reading feels a hell of a lot faster, collapsed headlines mitigates my discomfort with River of News style reading.
Better at false duplicates
Saving items is easy, saved items are out of the way (although I get a demerit for never getting into Bloglines keyboard shortcuts)
Tagging of feeds and items
Holding out hope for a GData based GReader API.

I find GReader suits my information foraging needs much better.

fwicki: Feed Mastering

2006-12-05T18:58:00-05:00

fwicki sounded good at first. Digging deeper, I'm trying to find out what the win is over tagging a group of feeds in Google Reader and having a custom feed generated from the tag. In fwicki there's a whizzy AJAX interface for grouping feeds, you have some control on the output flow of the feed "mashup", and there's a way to inject ads into/around the resulting feed. That's about it as far as I can tell.

Still waiting for a feed aggregator geared towards information foragers.

McGough: All Things IMAP

2006-12-05T18:43:00-05:00

A few weeks ago, I was investigating sophisticated IMAP hosting solutions. I now stand in awe of Nancy McGough's comprehensive coverage of IMAP providers, clients, and servers.

NMH: Verizon +1

2006-12-04T21:16:00-05:00

I generally view choosing services from Big Telecom (TM) as deciding amongst the least worst, but I have to +1 a couple of serices from Verizon. First off, if it's offered in your community, get Verizon FiOS (fiber optic) service. Big pipes, mucho gusto. Second, Verizon's Wireless BroadbandAccess works pretty well and eliminates wardriving for wi-fi. I didn't want to get locked in to a two year contract, so my tab runs about $80 a month, although you can chop the price considerably. But mostly I've been surprised at the coverage in the Eastern corridor which has been pretty reliable. At the worst, the feel is like old dialup connectivity and at best it seems like low end DSL. This is from the middle of the street, on Amtrak, in that coffehouse that doesn't offer Wi-Fi, the food court, the back of the car, the United terminal at Dulles, etc. etc. Bonus, having a PC card means not having to figure out how to pair your cell phone with your laptop.

N. b. "all you can eat" means 5 GB per month to Verizon. Like I said it's Big Telecom.

PyCon: Talks 2007

2006-12-04T20:59:00-05:00

The accepted talks at PyCon 2007, Feb 22 through Mar 1 in Dallas TX, shows a pretty interesting range of topics. Everything from compilers to testing to web frameworks to women in CS. Just scanning the talks I'd bin in them in the following rough categories: education, Python internals and infrastructure, web programming, programming language design and implementation, software engineering, application case studies. Definitely looks like good value for the money

Yahoo! Research: Berkeley Blog

2006-11-22T16:02:00-05:00

The Berkeley based arm of Yahoo! Research has a blog. Their current public projects focus on geotagged images and movie remixes. Despite the small posting sample, there's quite a few interesting folks there, and it'll be interesting to see how their work surfaces over time.

Rajaraman & Ullman: Data Mining Lectures

2006-11-20T18:32:00-05:00

Link parkin': Stanford's CS345, Autumn 2006: Data Mining handouts. Vetted by Greg Linden, who knows a little about this stuff.

NMH: Aggregator Clustering

2006-11-20T18:27:00-05:00

These past few days have highlighted for me why a little bit of item clustering would be useful in my aggregator. I read a goodly number of feeds, but I'm not an outlier. There were pretty distinct bursts of: Zune, Wii, PS3, and Peanut Butter. Just pull 'em all together, let me survey them in one fell swoop, and then I can get to the other distinctive stuff.

C'mon it can't be that hard.

MIT VI: Curriculum Revamp

2006-11-17T16:24:00-05:00

I'm really late to the party on this one, but MIT Course VI, the EECS major, is revamping the curriculum. The nugget that caught my eye in a posting from Lambda The Ultimate, was the potential removal of Scheme from the intro programming course. As a VI-III alum, I have but one thing to say:

SACRILEGE!! Even worse the charge is being led by Hal Abelson, one of the authors of the Wizard book.

Actually, the changes aren't that bad. Looks like they're putting two new intro courses that integrate EE and CS more tightly, at the start of the program. The programming for these courses is done in Python and that's a good thing. Meanwhile, good old 6.001 through 6.004 will be substantially unchanged, but folded into a bundle of 7 courses that serves as the second phase of the degree. Finally, advanced design / capstone classes, approaching graduate level difficulty, complete the studies. And this is the type of curriculum design is the type of thing Abelson is really good at.

[Via Lambda The Ultimate]

Bryant: Motionbox Review

2006-11-15T19:42:00-05:00

Motionbox is a web based video editing application targeted at casual video users. One of the neat aspects is the use of tagging to mark selected segments of video, helping search, discovery, and navigation. Their player also supports really rapid scanning/preview of a video reducing exploratory costs. Steve Bryant has more information on Motionbox, including some quotes from the CEO, Chris O'Brien.

[Via Lost Remote]

Frakes: Scripting iTunes

2006-11-14T22:09:00-05:00

Dan Frakes overviews the comprehensive Doug's AppleScripts for iTunes archive, picking out some highlights of the over 400 scripts available. A decent AppleScript interface lets prosumers overcome a number of shortcomings with iTunes.

NewsCloud: APIs

2006-11-14T21:48:00-05:00

If NewsCloud fails, it won't be because its web services APIs aren't thorough, with good usage examples to boot.

Bloglines: Playlists & Glimpses

2006-11-13T23:13:00-05:00

Bloglines has actually been working on their user interface recently. They have two new features, Playlists and Glimpses. Playlists look to be lightweight groupings of feeds and Glimpses give you quick, tooltip style, overviews of Playlists. I'm not sure how much of a UI advance this actually is, but the features are welcome experimentation in feed aggregators.

The irony is that I read the notice of Playlists and Glimpses in Google Reader, which is starting to grow on me. I'm feeling like my Bloglines days are numbered, but the jury is still out.

Snell: Getting to Know APP

2006-11-11T23:25:00-05:00

Link parkin': James Snell's "Getting to know the Atom Publishing Protocol", Part 1 and Part 2. A good intermediate overview of APP, including concrete examples using various systems such as Blogger, Roller, GCal and GBase. Nice emphasis of how to write into APP stores.

[Via the Google Code Blog]

Briggs: WSGI Overview

2006-11-10T15:55:00-05:00

WSGI is Python's answer to Java's servlets, just not as "enterprisey". I've been doing some tinkering developing a WSGI web app, but was highly confused about which servers support WSGI conformant apps and how they did so. Uche Ogbuji's introduction to WSGI is quite good, especially about the underlying design principles, but doesn't quite connect the deployment dots.

I found Jason Briggs "Getting Started with WSGI" to be a nice complement as a slightly more basic introduction. And it touches a little on the webservers that support WSGI.

Gruber: Stikkit Review

2006-11-10T15:42:00-05:00

If you're wondering about Stikkit, a new, well publicized, Web PIM tool, John Gruber has a thorough review. Summarizing his final analysis, the overall premise of the tool is flawed, but it does have some nice execution in places.

Getty Images: 10ways

2006-11-09T18:29:00-05:00

This set of neat interactive takes on digital images appeared over the summer, as opposed to my thought that it surfaced a few years ago, which stopped me posting about it. Didn't seem to get much play in the blogosphere, so what the heck. Sponsored by Getty Images, Sumona's information interactive is the most intriguing, striking me as a particularly interesting way to navigate a pile of digital images. Wonder what it would look like with a) custom collections and b) the additional goal of surfacing social information about the photos? Presuming of course, you had social information for the photos.

Carmo: Bayesian Aggregation

2006-11-09T18:14:00-05:00

Rui Carmo has integrated Bayesian filtering with RSS aggregation to improve his feed reading. So far the results look pretty good. His setup involves receiving new RSS items as SMTP e-mail messages, (e-mail, good old e-mail) which supports highly tuned and customized user interfaces along with automated scripts to process the messages in the background. At the same time it sounds like it was pretty easy to whip out a web interface to label messages if needed.

Any web or desktop aggregator with sophisticated APIs and a dirt cheap labeling mechanism (probably tagging) could replicate this to good effect. Then again I can't really think of any such combinations.

But I would be glad to be enlightened.

Rosenberg: Launch Pad

2006-11-08T22:47:00-05:00

Watching the Web 2.0 Summit coverage in the blogosphere has been entertaining. I particularly liked Scott Rosenberg's summary of the Launch Pad, a runway show of recent startups. Short and to the point.

What's up with Sphere making an appearance though? Isn't the company a little mature for these types of things? I sense they have little to no traction, and they even nuked their little Ajaxy time widget. Weird.

Rao: REAP

2006-11-07T21:00:00-05:00

REAP stands for

Retrieve — collect information from a variety of sources
Extract — extract data, facts, examples
Arrange — arrange documents and facts for use now or later
Present — compose information into artifacts of value

Which is Ramana Rao's model of what needs to be addressed "beyond search". In the comments, Mark Stefik chimes in with some tantalizing hints at work PARC has done with intelligence analysts. I wonder if these are business or security analysts? In any event, he suggests that tools for analysts fit within some broad strokes but differ significantly in the details. Contrast with Yahoo!'s consumer oriented FUSE vision. Via Knowledge Jolt with Jack

Grudin & Russell: Using Information

2006-11-07T20:43:00-05:00

Jonathan Grudin and Dan Russell, two CHI and CSCW giants, are running the second edition of their mini-track at HICSS 40. The mini-track title is Using Information: New Technologies, Ways & Means, and they've got a blog up which includes the accepted papers for the mini-track (along with the Persistent Conversation papers) as well as pointers on how to have a productive time at HICSS. This is from Grudin, who is a HICSS vet, so it's well worth the read.

In case it's not clear, I highly recommend HICSS because you get access to some bigwigs in a relatively relaxed environment, and the acceptance rate isn't rediculously discouraging. Granted, it's expensive, but it's a nice starting point for beginning academics.

Adobe: Open ActionScript VM

2006-11-07T20:30:00-05:00

Interesting. Adobe open sourced the virtual machine for ActionScript, the programming language of the Flash 9 player. The Mozilla Foundation has picked it up and started the Tamarin project around the vm, possibly to use it as a JavaScript engine in future versions of Firefox.

What I'm wondering, does this make it easier to target the Flash player from compilers for other languages? For example, could you compile a limited version of Python to this VM? Or a pedagogical language in a compilers class?

Also, this vm might be useful as a restricted execution environment within other languages.

Hurst: On Powerset

2006-11-06T22:41:00-05:00

I can't share Matthew Hurst's enthusiasm for Powerset, simply because I haven't been tracking the new NLP based search engine at all. But I did like how he teased a new direction for search innovation:

There are two key things here: the use of NLP and the disruption to the search interface. Finally, information retrieval will actually mean information retrieval, not document retrieval. One of the fundamental models of search that may be challenged in this new world is the fact that search engines are designed to take people to pages. The more we can understand and summarize the information on those pages, the weaker this model becomes and consequently advanced methods may herald a fundamental change in the 'search' business (which will need a new name pretty soon).

I don't know if the keyword/document search model is dead, as some folks are claiming, but I know there's a whole lot of ways to organize the world's data that haven't been tried yet. Some of them might work.

NMH: Google Reader Microreview

2006-11-05T16:40:00-05:00

Following up on some events that happened during my hiatus, I decided to start kicking the tires on the new version of Google Reader. I'm sort of digging it. Being absolutely stuck in the "River of News" format would drive me up a wall, but the ability to collect subscriptions using tags still means I can prioritize bundles of new items. If item marking and saving is markedly better than Bloglines, I'll probably switch over, especially if a Google Reader API ever materializes. I, and a fair number of other folks, use our aggregators as information foraging tools as well as news readers.

Weird. Take two months off, subscribers go up, according to Bloglines.

Lundh: Python with & for/in

2006-11-04T22:30:00-05:00

Nice overviews of how Python's with statement and for/in statement work, including their extensible nature, by Fredrik Lundh.

Chi & Pirolli: Social Information Foraging

2006-11-03T22:46:00-05:00

Ed Chi and Peter Pirolli, the latter of information foraging theory fame, are starting to investigate how the new plethora of social navigation and media toolls intersect with the information foraging model. "Social Information Foraging and Collaborative Search" (PDF) doesn't have a whole lot of meat on it, but hints at some interesting ways to model how groups of people search for information together.

Kennedy: Docuticker

2006-11-02T21:33:00-05:00

+1 on Shirl Kennedy's Docuticker

DocuTicker offers a hand-picked selection of resources, reports and publications from government agencies, NGOs, think tanks and other public interest organizations.

I've been subscribed to the webfeed for a while and it's the definition of serendipity. Where else can you get rigorous documents on the impact of sports in the public sector?

Viégas & Wattenberg: Communication-Minded Visualization

2006-11-01T21:08:00-05:00

Back in May, at the SIGCHI Social Viz Workshop, I cornered Martin Wattenberg for a few moments and bounced the following idea off of him. One of the interesting results of the Baby NameVoyager was that the visualizations had become social media: artifacts to be created, discussed, and shared in groups. This despite zero support for collaboration built into the system. I also posited that there could be a lot of interesting research issues to follow pursuing this line of thinking.

Wattenberg and his colleague Fernanda Viégas seem to be picking up the ball, and have issued a manifesto on Communication-Minded Visualization (PDF). I don't know if I planted a seed (actually I highly doubt it since Martin and Fernanda are both twice as smart as me and were probably already headed in this direction), but I'll be interested to see if this coalesces into a research community. There's lots of fun challenges, from the systems aspects of just getting something to work, to the visual and interactive design issues, to the investigation of social effects given such visualizations.

In addtion to reading the paper, you can also get an audio recording and slides from Fernanda's presentation on "Democratizing Visualization" at idea2006.

I know what you're thinking. All I can say is Life Changes (TM). Big Time. Things seem to be easing up a bit but no guarantees.

Amazon: Elastic Compute Cloud

2006-08-24T18:05:00-04:00

Well I wasn't too far off a month ago when I hypothesized Amazon providing a commodity virtual machine service.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

...
You have complete control of your instances. You have root access to each one, and you can interact with them as you would any machine. Each instance predictably provides the equivalent of a system with a 1.7Ghz Xeon CPU, 1.75GB of RAM, 160GB of local disk, and 250Mb/s of network bandwidth.

I was off a couple of factors on the memory, an order of magnitude on disk, and probably a factor of 2 on CPU speed. I got the pricing just about right and even hit on the bandwidth discount for communicating with S3. Simple web based specing and ordering of VMs got lost a bit in the need for security, but I can't fault Amazon as they have to make sure the service doesn't become the spawn of horrifically spamming botnets.

I didn't realize it at the time, and many in the blogosphere are having the same incorrect interpretation, but EC2 isn't supposed to knock out private virtual and dedicated server solutions. EC2 is really for folks who need to build a cluster of machines but don't have the sysadmin staff, rackspace, and funds for hardware, available. For a mom and pop LAMP server running a lightly used Web site, EC2 is probably overkill. For a small Web startup short on cash and people, EC2 might be an attractive alternative to building your own data center.

Put it all together and you've got cheap, powerful computational units (VMs), reliable distributed messaging (SQS), and inexpensive massive storage (S3), all from one vendor, with reasonable (not easy, but reasonable) programmatic APIs. Interesting times.

Lundh: ElementSoup

2006-08-23T21:00:00-04:00

Fredrik Lundh combines the elementtree module with BeautifulSoup to make grokking arbitrary HTML a bit more Pythonic.

Krohn, Kohler, Kaashoek: Events Can Make Sense

2006-08-22T21:42:00-04:00

Link parkin': Events Can Make Sense, by Max Krohn, Eddie Kohler, and Frans Kaashoek.

Events have earned a reputation for confounding programmers. This work advocates new language features (called tame extensions) that simplify event programming in languages such as C++. Like multithreaded programs but unlike typical event programs, tamed programs use standard control flow constructs, and automatically-managed local variables. In practice, tame is implemented with a C++ source-to-source translator, without compiler modifications, platform-specific support, significant runtime overhead or major semantic compromises. The implementation is backwards-compatible with an existing event library and has already found application in class projects, open-source projects, and production Web sites. Developers on these projects report that the tame approach is a significant improvement over the event-driven status quo.

[Via Hack the Planet]

Kochanski: Tunesafe

2006-08-21T21:40:00-04:00

Martin Kochanski's hypothetical tunesafe application is a pretty interesting thought exercise on how to make money off of Amazon's S3 by backing up people's iPod tunes.

[Via Jeff Barr]

Gafter: Java Closures

2006-08-20T19:40:00-04:00

If Neal Gafter et. al.'s proposal has any legs, looks like Java will eventually get closures, although the static typing doesn't make them look like a whole lot of fun to use.

[Via Lambda the Ultimate]

del.icio.us: New Features

2006-08-20T19:33:00-04:00

For a time there, del.icio.us seemed to be pretty moribund. Recently, there's been a spate of changes including: a new frontpage, secure API access, advertising, and promoting active users. Joshua Schachter, the head del.icio.us honcho, is pretty conservative, but maybe we'll see some interesting new innovations in the tagging arena. Other than developers baking tagging into applications for buzzword compliance, I haven't seen much new in terms of how tagging is designed as a user interface element.

NMH: Web App Details Please

2006-08-19T15:53:00-04:00

Here's a few web application features that I think would be fairly useful to have a shared body of knowledge about. Put another way, I'd like to see how someone else designed and implemented them so I can rip them off:

Invitation systems ala Gmail when it first started. To my eye invitations have a surface triviality that probably goes away when you have to manage the rationing of invites. Wonder what it really looks like inside. Any small web startup could benefit from having such a system
Flickr's authentication system for allowing third party applications to perform operations, some dangerous, on a user's behalf. Their scheme also supports revocation of permissions.
Yahoo! style rate limiting, to prevent morons from taking down your shiny new web services API.

Horowitz: On Interestingness

2006-08-18T22:41:00-04:00

Bradley Horowitz writes a bit on Flickr's interestingness. While Findory's Greg Linden focuses on "getting the crap out", Horowitz notes that Flickr embraces the junk:

“So Flickr is a system that accommodates taking a ‘worthless’ picture of a hangnail, or a breathtaking Ansel Adams-like landscape. The cool thing is that while creating a frictionless environment that serves both scenarios, we can also determine which of the two is likely more ‘interesting’ to the community at large.”

Of course this is a false dichotomy as Findory attempts to surface personalized interesting bits too and does it with a lot less user information than Flickr. Either way I'm more and more convinced that for systems at Web scale, the real problems involve dealing with noise, which neatly captures cheaters, morons, and minimal information.

MacAskill: smugmug + S3

2006-08-16T22:34:00-04:00

I may not have to eat my words regarding S3, but the scent of them cooking is definitely starting to waft. Don MacAskill, the CEO of smugmug, describes another case study of commercial usage of Amazon's Simple Storage Service. Lots of business advantages therein, but I will point out that smugmug doesn't completely bet the farm and dispense with its own storage. Maybe that's the right tradeoff though. Develop an in-house storage architecture and carefully use S3 as a "redundant secondary storage for use in cases of outages, data loss, or other catastrophe."

Still waiting for the game changing, highly interactive, AJAXy, Web 2.0 application built using S3 as its main storage system.

Facebook: Developer APIs

2006-08-16T22:05:00-04:00

Link parkin': Facebook now has web services APIs. Social software and network researchers, start your engines.

Russel: Defining Comet

2006-08-15T17:55:00-04:00

A slightly stale bit, but I ran across this piece by Alex Russell which defines Comet, an extension (improvement?) on Ajax style client-side communication. That's my brief summary, but Russell fleshes out the technical differences between Ajax and Comet in more detail. It took me a while to untangle a key figure in his post, but then I realized that the key point of the Comet architecture involves a server autonomously pushing data to a client side application, not just the client making requests and receiving responses.

The hope is that by putting a name to the collective techniques, and identifying specific examples in the wild, momentum and shared experiences can be built. For example, Dojo, a client-side JavaScript toolkit which Russell helps develop, already supports Comet techniques. If you read some followup posts on his blog, looks like there's already quite a bit of action around Comet.

Elza: Pastels

2006-08-14T10:45:00-04:00

Link parkin': Dethe Elza, the developer of Pastels, says, "Pastels is an example project for creating an OS X screensaver in Python using PyObjC." Mmmmmm, screensaver in Python.

Koester: Python Live Coding

2006-08-13T13:02:00-04:00

Live coding is real time programming of a system as the system is running. The technique is of interest in creating computational art, being a means to put human performers into the creative loop.

Logan Koester did some hypothesizing and prototyping of live coding in Python. The technique strikes my fancy as a way for computer science instructors to make classes more performative and, shudder, interactive. Also, I just find this alternate universe of computational art, that I know little about, fascinating. It's fun to discover stuff like ChucK, SuperCollider, and Fluxus.

Kudos to MarsEdits's automatic post saving, which rescued today's efforts from a brief power outage induced death. Time to get a UPS.

UMass IESL: Rexa.info

2006-08-12T15:11:00-04:00

Rexa.info is search engine for the academic computing literature developed by the University of Massachusetts, Amherst Information Extraction and Synthesis Laboratory. Here's a brief summary of Rexa:

Rexa is a digital library and search engine covering the computer science research literature and the people who create it. Rexa aims to facilitate research progress and collaboration by providing efficient browsing, search, associations and analysis among papers, people, organizations, venues and research communities.

You have to sign up for an account to use Rexa, but in return you get to annotate and tag citations of interest.

[Via Stephen Glass]

Burton & Hurst: How Many Blogs!?

2006-08-09T16:59:00-04:00

Both Kevin Burton and Matthew Hurst are a bit suspicious of David Sifry's recent state of the blogosphere report. Count me in as well. Burton delves into the number of posts per blog, among other things, and through a couple of calculations argues that the number of "active" blogs is a few millions and only growing linearly. The comments on his post are also worth reading.

Of course, this hinges on what do you call an active blog, which is where Hurst comes in. The blogosphere, if you conflate that with Technorati's index, seems to include a lot of dead stuff. Hurst also points out, more accurately, that Technorati is just one sample of the blogosphere. The hard part is how to extrapolate from that to a comprehensive picture of blogging. Studious readers will note however, that Hurst works for a Technorati competitor, just to be clear, and I've briefly met Hurst in a professional setting. I definitely lean towards his scientific approach to observing and analyzing the weblog ecology.

From my point of view, Sifry's report really calls out for some segmentation based upon blog activity. I'm not sure how productive "blogosphere is doubling" announcements are any more. They're akin to Google and Yahoo!'s index size announcements. Great! But how come I can't find that page I was searching for.

Willison: YDN Python Center

2006-08-08T17:08:00-04:00

The eminent Simon Willison has put together a Python Developer Center for the Yahoo! Developer Network. All about how to take advantage of Yahoo!'s web services using the Python programming language. The only thing I'd add is some mention of the really wonderful pycurl, for high performance, high flexiblity, highly standard conforming web client code.

Case: GMaps API Tutorial

2006-08-08T13:49:00-04:00

Googler Eric Case collects links to a Google Maps API Tutorial that was run by Developer.com.

diigo: Social Annotation

2006-08-07T22:42:00-04:00

Link parkin': Diigo is about "Social Annotation". The company's about page, promotes the site as combining social bookmarking and social note taking that appears "in situ" on web pages. The tool got some pretty good press from the Techcrunch crowd.

Man! The ghost of Third Voice just won't die.

NMH: Bloglines Frustration

2006-08-06T20:57:00-04:00

Okay, now Bloglines is losing blog posts that I've marked as "keep new", my low tech way of keeping a post around until I want to comment on the post or bookmark it. The lossage wouldn't be so bad if the left pane wasn't taunting me with counts that seem to indicate the system still has those marked posts somewhere.

Oh, and that duplicate post presentation effect seems to be spreading to other webfeeds as well.

NMH: Mass VM Programming?

2006-08-05T14:34:00-04:00

Speaking of virtual machine techonology, out there somewhere, there's probably a team of developers working on a programming model for massive swarms of virtual machines. The folks at Northwestern's Plab, along with a growing virtualization research community, are making great strides in the utility and performance of virtual machines. But I wonder if systems built out of creating, launching, and coordinating large numbers of virtual machines has fundamental differences from what we know of traditional distributed programming and concurrent programming? If so would devising and implementing good tools for good programmers to build such systems endow a PageRank style competitive advantage?

VMWare: Server & Appliances

2006-08-04T21:44:00-04:00

VMWare, great software for running virtual machines, has grown up quite a bit since I last worked with it. VMWare Server is freely, as in beer, available. Plus VMWare has solidified the notion of pre-built, packaged, task specific vms called virtual appliances. And there seems to be a thriving market in virtual appliances.

[Via Jeremy Zawodny's linkblog 03/09/2006]

Chowdhury: AOL Research

2006-08-04T21:25:00-04:00

Apparently AOL has a research group focusing on information retrieval. Makes sense, and the've recently decloaked, releasing a number of large search related datasets and a search API.

[Via Matthew Hurst]

Parparita: Feed Extension Usage

2006-08-03T21:19:00-04:00

Google engineer Mihai Parparita did a study of webfeeds subscribed to in Google Reader. The goal of the work was to see what RSS/Atom namespace extensions were being used the most. The results were interesting albeit to a narrow audience of aggregator builders and webfeed wonks like me. Still it's good to have the information out there.

I was also struck by this casual toss off line by Parparita:

I wrote a small MapReduce program to go over our BigTable and get the top 50 namespaces based on the number of feeds that use them.

I haven't actually seen this code but it feels like this was a one day hack.

Across a huge number of subscription lists.

Using a large number of parallel machines.

I'm engaging in a bit of speculation, but I think this is another example of how Google has a powerful, Web scale programming tool, developed by research, that enables frontline engineers to be creative. It's probably fairly rare to hear in the distributed, parallel, and high performance computing communities a sentence start with, "I wrote a small Foo program to..."

Vinson: Beyond RSS

2006-08-02T21:18:00-04:00

Jack Vinson picks up on some enterprise syndication features in KnowNow's new products. Looks like a meld of web crawling, feed crawling, and event notification on a big scale. There's also a hint of enhanced aggregation, which pulled Attensa's CEO, Craig Barnes, into the conversation. Apparently, Attensa is also doing enterprisey things with RSS.

I'd have to drill down on the postings and press releases to see if there's any there there, but where I feel desktop aggregation is a bit moribund, large corporate customers may be driving some "hidden" innovation.

Freeze: Creating Ruby DSLs

2006-08-01T22:32:00-04:00

Warning, serious nerd stuff coming.

So I'm trying to wrap my head around the recent buzz around DSLs, domain specific languages, given I was really into PLDI when there were a couple of academic conferences on the topic. As best I can tell, DSLs are really hot in the Ruby community, and JIm Freeze's introduction, "Creating DSLs with Ruby" is the most accessible I've seen so far. Can't say I'm overwhelmed so far, as these Ruby DSLs mainly look like crafty usage of a syntactic shortcut, eval, and default method lookup. Declarative style languages are handled straightforwardly but how does this face up to other design points. While very useful, I don't see a path to doing some of the major syntactic extensions ala Paul Graham in On Lisp, such as anaphoric macros. Another good point, made by Oleg Kiselyov, via Anton von Straaten, is that macros allow one to abstract over the stuff that isn't first class in the language.

Bonus: Lambda The Ultimate has a couple of good sections on DSLs

Neoformix: Vizzing Boing Boing

2006-07-31T21:28:00-04:00

Neoformix has been having fun visualizing Boing Boing's post archive. The results are uncomfortably close to pie-charts for those with a Tufteian (Tuftian?) bent, but it's an interesting experiment.

[Via Matthew Hurst]

Klein and Dytham: Pecha Kucha

2006-07-29T12:26:00-04:00

Wonder if undergraduate project presentations would be better done Pech Kucha style? 20 slides, 20 seconds per slide, no exceptions. Sort of like submitting to the discipline of the haiku.

Filmcritic.com : Top 50 Endings

2006-07-29T12:23:00-04:00

I'm not one for lists usually, but I have to add two submissions to Filmcritic.com's Top 50 Movie Endings of All Time. First, since they're surprisingly light on horror films, I'd add John Carpenter's Halloween. Between the disappearance of Michael Myers, the look on Jamie Lee Curtis' face, and the legendarily creepy music you know in your gut that "You can't kill The Boogie Man." Plus, he's outside the theater somewhere waiting for you, maybe in your own house.

Second, a quintessential guy movie, Ocean's Eleven, has a quintessential bit of guy humor when George Clooney, as Daniel Ocean, is met by Brad Pitt's Rusty Ryan when Ocean gets out of prison wearing the tuxedo from the night he got busted in Vegas:

Rusty: I hope you were the groom.
Ocean (after a slight pause): Ted Nugent called. He wants his shirt back.

Not to mention the circularity of this scene as it ties to the beginning of the movie.

Bonus bantering

Tess Ocean: We need to get Rusty a girlfriend
Rusty: There's a women's prison just up the road

And further in the comedy vein, the end of Young Frankenstein is to die for. Madeline Kahn as The Bride followed up by Teri Garr asking "But what did you get from The Monster?" just leaves you howling.

Must... stop... thinking... about... this!

NMH: Delayed Release

2006-07-28T14:25:00-04:00

Just thinking out loud. What if you had crawler/monitor that recorded a daily snapshot of the popular items or front pages of the big social media and blog sites: digg, reddit memeorandom, slashdot, gawker empire, etc. Pull the links and stories out and record what the blogosphere does for 30 days around those stories, but don't publish anything. 30 days later, summarize and recap to give a delayed release retrospective. Rinse, cycle, repeat every day providing a continuing look back at the real(?) impact of the socially selected items. Provide as service and get rich!!

If someone ever says, "Did anybody ever look back at what happened with....?" say "We did!"

Of course all those blog search engines could already be doing this, presuming they archive back at least 30 days, or someone else could build it if they provided decent APIs. Such is life.

Hurst: Blog Mining and Viz

2006-07-28T10:54:00-04:00

Okay, I really need to subscribe to Matthew Hurst's blog, Data Mining. There, done.

Hurst works for BlogPulse/Intelliseek/BuzzMetrics/Nielsen, whatever they are today. They specialize in bringing hard core techniques from the AI community to bear on analyzing and understanding a large chunk of the blogosphere. He's had a recent series of interesting posts on a variety of topics including distance based coloring in graph viz, the long tail of the blogosphere, and modeling the influence of visit traffic sent from other blogs.

Mayfield: Open Socialtext

2006-07-27T21:59:00-04:00

Socialtext has open sourced its enterprise wiki software. I was gonna kick the tires to see what extensibility features Socialtext had inside, but looking at the roadmap I think I'll wait a bit.

Huberman & Wu: Attention Economics

2006-07-27T21:42:00-04:00

Bernardo Huberman e-mailed last week to let me know of a new work he'd co-authored with Fang Wu. Entitled "The Economics of Attention: Maximizing User Value in Information-Rich Environments" (paper PDF), the paper presents a mathematical model which, given a set of attributes on pieces of information and a requirement that only a small subset of those items can be displayed to a user, maximizes the users utility, in the economic sense.

If you thought that sentence was a brainfull, you should see the math in the paper. Usually, with paitience and persistence, I can work out the math in a technical paper. However, this one uses terminology common to fields I've never been conversant in, and I have to admit this paper is a bit beyond my meager mathematical skills. Thankfully, the sections with the greek symbols are wrapped by a pretty straightforward context and example.

If efficiently iimplementable, this would be the type of mechanism I'd put inside a webfeed aggregator to creep one step closer to The Celestial Daily Me.

Yahoo!: Updated Search SDK

2006-07-26T21:55:00-04:00

Yahoo!'s web services APIs for search are much nicer than any other search engine out there, and now the new developer's SDK supports a bunch of fun languages.

digg: Stack & Swarm

2006-07-25T17:53:00-04:00

I don't use digg but they've launched a couple of interesting real time information visualizations for the stories that get collaboratively selected: Stack and Swarm. I can't do justice to Stamen Design's beautiful work with a text description, but they have surface slickness if not demonstrable long term utility.

Interestingly, the digg labs site threatens to release a public API for the data feeding these visualizations.

[Via Waxy's Links]

blogmarks.net: APP Inside

2006-07-24T16:42:00-04:00

Link parkin': Blogmarks.net, a social bookmarking system resembling a combination of del.icio.us and wists, uses the Atom Publishing Protocol as its web services API (API Documentation).

Contrast and comparison with the del.icio.us API would make an interesting case study.

And just because I'm thinking about it, feels like it's time for a new generation of collegiate courses about engineering web applications. The user facing API and client side interface programming aspects have changed radically over the past year or two, not to mention the advances embodied by the various approaches to web frameworks. This particular topic also has a nice combination of practical market value for graduating students, but enough meaty underlying CS issues (UI design, DB modeling, scaling performance, software development methodologies etc.) so the course wouldn't be too vocational. Call it a team oriented, senior capstone and even the college administrators might love it!

digg: Sports

2006-07-22T23:12:00-04:00

digg has a sports page. Maybe I'll take a look now and see what all the excitement is about. Then again, if geeks run the page, it'll probably be a sad sight. It's my studied opinion that while many sports geeks are tech geeks, the converse does not hold.

[Via MicroPersuasion]

Gregorio: Implementing APP

2006-07-21T22:04:00-04:00

Joe Gregorio outlines how to implement the Atom Publishing Protocol, a RESTful API for publishing and editing Web resources, using Python. If you're grasping about looking for a way to provide a web services api for your application, starting with APP and folding in your own extensions or data model would be a good start. This would be a similar approach to what Google does with GData, which is just Atom, APP, and A9 stored queries.

Probst: Lisping Flickr

2006-07-20T18:28:00-04:00

Clickr is a Common Lisp client for the Flickr API, written by Mark Probst. Probst has a bunch of interesting code projects, including Metapixel, a Photomosaic generator, which I've toyed around with a bit.

In his blog, he also notes a big hole in the much hyped Zooomr: no community features, unless you count tags as a community feature.

NMH: Costarica Moving

2006-07-20T16:27:00-04:00

There may be some outage with costarica.cs.northwestern.edu over the next few days. The server should be moving physical locations and IP addresses, so it might take the DNS entries a bit to propagate.

NMH: Amazon VM Service?

2006-07-19T23:06:00-04:00

Just thinking out loud. What if Amazon Web Services LLC offered a virtual machine service that was as dirt cheap and simple as S3 and SQS? A buck a virtual network, a dime a VM instantiation (10 GB disk, 512 MB RAM, 1GHz P4 performance), bandwidth at the same cost as S3 (maybe a discount for using S3 from a VM). A great web based specing and ordering experience with 4 or 5 really obvious base installations (including all of the top Web application stacks) tuned for building Amazon Web Services apps.

Might not be differentiated enough from the Virtual Private Server providers (e.g. Rimuhosting) for Amazon to pursue, but it would be a nice computational complement to S3 and SQS.

Now that would be game changing!!

Huynh: AJAX Timelines

2006-07-19T22:34:00-04:00

Link parkin': Visually pleasing, complex timelines presented using a DHTML/AJAXy widget implemented by David François Huynh. This is part of MIT's SIMILE project which is developing robust, open source tools for the Semantic Web. While I haven't been converted into a Semantic Web True Believer, SIMILE has an interesting portfolio of projects.

[Via infosthetics]

Lange & Tawde: Topic Clustering Aggregator

2006-07-18T23:53:00-04:00

Kevin Lang and Vivek Tawde of Yahoo! Research constructed an RSS reader that clusters items based upon a fixed set of topics. The aggregator runs as part of the Yahoo! Widget Engine so it's essentially a desktop RSS reader. Also, from my read of the project description, the selected sources are rigged or at least initialized to a providential set. However the task is still quite tricky since the cluster sizes apparently aren't fixed and have to be learned from a given pool of content.

Another piece of The Daily Me drifts into view.

Bloglines: +1/-1

2006-07-17T17:37:00-04:00

+1 to Bloglines for picking up my blog pings near instantaneously.

-1 for not dealing with duplicates properly in a number of feeds I read. Steve Rubel's feed is probably the most irritating, because I'm repeatedly getting 20 or so of his posts over and over. Not that I don't like the content, or didn't the first time I read it!

IronPython: 1.0 Beta

2006-07-17T17:27:00-04:00

IronPython, an implementation of Python on the .NET runtime, is fast approaching a 1.0 release. Jeff Cogswell has a longish introduction to what IronPython is and what it can do. One thing I can't figure out though, is where IronPython diverges from CPython.

Bonus link: A March Q&A with Guido von Rossum, the creator of Python. He doesn't say much about what he's doing at Google, but drops some hints about Python 3000.

Hat tip to J. Scott Miller.

Future Everything: Futuresonic Live & Urban Play

2006-07-16T12:09:00-04:00

I guess the best analog in the US is SXSW, but Futuresonic Live's music and Urban Play's artistic focus speak to me more, especially the Social Technologies Summit. There's gotta be something like it here in the states!

[Via Tom Carden]

Albert: Baseball & Statistics

2006-07-16T11:56:00-04:00

Purchasing Baseball Hacks motivated me to refresh my horrifically stale understanding of basic statistics and probability. The last time I seriously engaged with stats is over 20 years ago for a sophomore course, and oddly I've never been forced to reconnect. Casting about for some additional material, I landed on two works authored by Jim Albert, a statistician at Bowling Green State University.

His Teaching Statistics Using Baseball is a thin work which is best used as a supplement to a traditional stats course. For example, there's a couple of places where the book assumes knowledge of MINITAB, a popular entry level stats package. Curve Ball: Baseball, Statistics, and the Role of Chance in the Game, written with Jay Bennett, is a more complete book, with few assumptions of the reader. Curve Ball clearly uses a lot of basic material from Teaching Statistics, so they're somewhat redundant. If I had to only recommend one it would be Curve Ball.

However, both books are good at highlighting the role of chance and working through concrete examples that separate performance, which is something observed, and ability, which is something claimed to be innate. Their best example is the streakiness of batting in players. One can often see negative and positive streaks in a player's hitting performance, but is that streakiness part of the player's inherent ability? In situations involving chance, some observed performance is simply attributable to randomness. Curve Ball and Teaching Statistics both delve into how to model and reason about these issues with concrete examples that are interesting to the average sports fan.

Also, the examples are easily translatable to hacking in Python, especially since Retrosheet makes a lot of baseball data available. Fair warning though. Their game event data files reflect the inherent messiness of scoring baseball, so parsing them isn't trivial, but that's a fun challenge unto itself.

Barr: Cardbox

2006-07-15T12:47:00-04:00

Now to mashup the last two posts, Jeff Barr highlights the Cardbox application. Cardbox looks like a Win 32 semi-structured database application, akin to Mac OS's venerable Tindebrox, and a contemporary of the late, lamented HyperCard. As advertised, Cardbox has both remote scripting and plug-ins. Barr points out that the Cardbox extensibility has been hijacked to support S3 integration for internet backup of Cardbox databases and explicit inclusion of S3 objects.

Amazon: Production SQS

2006-07-15T12:31:00-04:00

In November 2004, I gushed a little bit about Amazon's Simple Queue Service (SQS), a web hosted, reliable, persistent, messaging queue. Back then it was free, but beta. Now the SQS has gone production, meaning the feature set is stable, you can get an unlimited number of queues, and it costs money. But SQS is cheap on the scale of Amazon's S3.

Speaking of which, SQS and S3 start to make a nice foundation for building Web applications which I'm sure is Amazon's intent. You provide the compute engines and user interface, and they host the hard parts of the web scale infrastructure.

I've said before that I didn't think S3 was a game changer, but Amazon's web infrastructure strategy might be.

Gruber: Plug-Ins + Scripting

2006-07-15T12:15:00-04:00

John Gruber articulates most elegantly why the combination of external scriptability and internal extensibility make for powerful applications and eliminates some of the demand for open-sourcing those apps. In particular, while I agree with Kevin Burton that an open source aggregator would be nice, especially for research purposes, one with excellently designed scripting and plug-ins would be even better.

On Win32 the external scripting part isn't taken nearly as seriously as on MacOS even though COM is fairly decent for this purpose. Other than Microsofts's own apps, most tools have non-existent to crappy remote object models. As far as I know, no aggregators really support remote scripting. Awasu is one of the few that I know of that has any plug-in model.

If I ever teach my scripting languages class again, I also need to hone in on this point, since such languages are really handy on both the remote scripting (duh!) and plug-in sides of the equation. This generates powerful effects.

MacManus: Rhapsody Web Services

2006-07-14T09:22:00-04:00

Nice overview of Rhapsody's Web Services, by Richard MacManus at Read/Write Web. Rhapsody is probably the biggest competitor to the iTunes Music Store, but does a much better job of leveraging streaming audio to support the celestial jukebox. If you actually read the Rhapsody Web Services SDK documentation, the API seems a bit thin. However, MacManus' post puts the facilities in context.

Interestingly, it's possible to get an RSS feed of your listening history.

Meunier and Silva: PLT Spy

2006-07-14T08:53:00-04:00

Ask and ye shall receive. PLT Spy is an implementation of Python on top of PLT Scheme. The system was implemented by Philippe Meunier and Daniel Silva way back in 2003!! Shows how closely I've been paying attention.

Hat tip to Jens Axel Søgaard.

Aho, Lam, Sethi, Ullman: New Dragon Book

2006-07-13T11:42:00-04:00

20 years on and now there's going to be a new edition of The Dragon Book, the canonical textbook on compilation. That $108 projected price is a bit daunting though!!

New features include discussions of interprocedural program analysis, garbage collection, just in time compilation, and optimization for parallel machines. They must cover instruction level parallelism somewhere and how it affects code generation. That's been a big change since 1986. Also, Addison-Wesly seems to be running some sort of online assignment tool called Gradiance, in conjunction with the book.

Of course the real question is, what's the cover going to look like? Will the Dragon still be there? How about the Knight? If so, what will their new editions look like?

Enquiring minds want to know!!

Felten: Net Neutrality Nuts & Bolts

2006-07-12T08:54:00-04:00

If you haven't been keeping up with your network neutrality reading, or your position on the issue hasn't congealed into a fixed stance, Ed Felten's net neutrality backgrounder (PDF) makes for smart reading.

Torkington: Ning's Cool!

2006-07-11T08:44:00-04:00

I have to admit that I had the same impressions of Ning that Nat Torkington did, and I don't even read TechCrunch. However, his writeup of a meeting with the Ning crew does a hell of a job selling the product. First off he explains how out of the box Ning isn't for me the "serious" hacker, but for communities of non-professional programmers, enabling a gentle slope for those who desire a Web application but don't have the obvious chops or connections. Second, the underlying Ning services seem eminently exploitable by a pro developer looking to outsource stuff like authentication and semi-structured data storage.

Like I said, I've been known to be wrong.

Hurst: Blogosphere Mapping

2006-07-09T16:53:00-04:00

Matthew Hurst has been doing some interesting mapping and visualization of segments of the blogosphere.

Robb: Killing MS R&D

2006-07-08T18:23:00-04:00

Riffing on an idle thought from John Robb. What would the impact on academic CS research be if MS started downsizing Microsoft Research? One could make an argument that educational institutions are already oversupplied with faculty material given current enrollments. This would just be piling on. I think you'd see a little boost in startups and a big boon for startups. There'd be a few more Paul Graham types running around to either start new things or pitch in with existing concerns. Also, Amazon, Yahoo, and Google would win big. You might also see some trickle over into other non-obvious disciplines like biology and the social sciences.

That would also be MS throwing in the towel on leadership in Web scale computing.

Broekema: CLPython

2006-07-08T18:11:00-04:00

Neato! William Broekema has developed an implementation of Python written in Common Lisp. That makes for four different languages Python has been implemented in: C, Java, CL and Python. For PLDI snobs, some of the signs of a language being "real" is that it has multiple implementations, indicating a diversity of implementation strategies, and that it self-hosts, meaning that the language can be implemented within itself. Self-hosting also means that the language at least approaches having an operational semantics, if not a formal semantics. (Don't shoot me real PLDI researchers!!). While there are plenty of other languages to hack around on, I would think working on program analysis and software engineering tools for Python code might be a valuable line of research.

Another interesting usage for such implementations is in the development of restricted execution environments. Say you want to give a Common Lisp application an embedded scripting language. The obvious choice is to use eval as an escape hatch into the same Common Lisp environment, but that's fraught with security issues. Instead you expose CLPython, where you can carefully craft the scripting environment to prevent bad things from happening.

Finally, I have to imagine CLPython could be straightforwardly transliterated to Scheme, whence one could start to show off all those snazzy applications Scheme's continuations to implement Python's funky control structures.

Google: Academic Papers

2006-07-06T17:50:00-04:00

Plus: Google updated it's list of academic papers to 2005/2006.

Minus: Looks like the links to all the old papers disappeared. Except for a few high profile, Google specific papers.

Still, worth having around, although the new set of papers seems highly skewed to machine learning, trust, and cryptography in my eye. Makes sense given The Global War on Spam (TM). Not much on classic os/nsdi type stuff or distributed systems, though.

[Via ResourceShelf, which also has a bonus link to Microsoft's experimental Phlat, desktop search project. I saw the talk on Phlat at CHI 2006 and the system looks pretty intriguing.]

Enthought: Python 2.4.3 Edition

2006-07-06T17:35:00-04:00

Talk about the kitchen sink. Enthought packages up a bunch of freely available Python modules, some of which are tricky to build, and creates a nice, Windows only, installation. This amalgamation is particularly tuned to scientific computing, but a beginning Python programmer, or even budding computer science student, could do worse than grab the Enthought edition to get started with. This goes beyond batteries included to nuclear power plant included!

Kuchling: Python FP HOWTO

2006-07-05T13:02:00-04:00

Andrew Kuchling warns that the current URL is unstable, but his HOWTO on functional programming in Python is a nice concise overview of functional programming features in the language. At the least, I learned of (actually probably relearned) the enumerate function. In geekspeak, enumerate generates, from a sequence, a sequence of indexes and sequence items. Exceedingly handy.

Linden: Personalization v Spam

2006-07-03T11:47:00-04:00

Greg Linden nicely summarizes one argument for personalization in search and other forms of aggregation. If the results are personalized, the payoff for spammers decreases, hopefully disincenting (sp?) them from spam attempts.

NMH: Sayonara Evanston

2006-06-17T20:49:00-04:00

Today I attended graduation for both Northwestern's College of Engineering and the College of Arts and Sciences. It was a graduation of sorts for me as well, as I sat with the other faculty seeing undergraduates off into a bright future. I told you guys I'd be out of this business by the age of 40, and if nothing else I try to be a man of my word. I'll keep this one by a cushy 9 months.

My appointment with NU officially ends the 31st of August. Within the next 36 hours, I'm going to grab a bunch of clothes, some books, and some computing gear, then rood trip to the greater Washington, DC where my wife's been for 9 months now. A native Chicagoan she landed a gig that is a great career advance for her. For the rest of the summer, I'll be working with Medill's fellows in the News21 program, helping them implement web based, multimedia presentations of their reporting on privacy, civil liberties, and homeland security. Medill has a Washington, DC office so this works out perfectly. I should be back in the Chicago area a couple of times over the summer for various non-Northwestern related activities.

I'm not quite sure what I'll be doing after the summer, but if you need a versatile, multitasking, wicked fast learning, New Media Hacker yearning to scratch some new itches, I'm still available. DC area is a hard requirement unless you can give me enough money so my wife can retire. I could be convinced to commute to Chicago or NYC with the right perks.

New Media Hack will truck on for a few more months, while I wrap up loose ends here in Evanston. Depending on administrative largesse, it may even continue on into the next academic year. I'm debating whether to relocate the site, its current contents, and its sensiblity, or reinvent in whole cloth. I'll have a decision in a month or two.

Ciao!!

Efimova: On ICWSM

2006-06-16T21:51:00-04:00

Lilia wonders how the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media will contrast with Blogtalk. If I had to guess from looking at the list of organizers and the program committee (a flyer was handed out at WWW '06) it'll be very North American, fairly academic (there's a decent number of industry types involved), and much more formal (probably a straightahead conference format). My guess is that there'll be plenty of iterations on text mining of weblogs, network analysis of blog communities, and dealing with the menace of splogs. Discussion on culture and practice of weblogs will probably be quite minor.

Not that there's anything wrong that!

Paper deadline is December 8th, 2006. Conference dates, March 27th - 28th. Location, Boulder, Colorado, USA.

Henderson: Building Scalable Websites

2006-06-16T21:10:00-04:00

Like many out there, I eagerly anticipated the arrival of Building Scalable Websites, by Cal Henderson. I got my copy this week and ripped through it in about 48 hours. Unfortunately, I was quite disappointed.

Probably, I was unconconciously holding the book up the standard of Philip Greenspun's writings, including "Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing" and "Internet Application Workbook", which are both still pretty good reads on the fundamentals of engineering web applications. Much has changed since the mid 90's which is why Building Scalable Websites could have been a great update. My major complaints are three:

No Flickr war stories!! Where's the story about wiping out a terabyte of photos and having to miraculously rescue the data from barely working tape? Or rolling out a feature and subsequently having 36 hours of downtime? This is where Greenspun really excels, and it definitely helps break up the monotony of the rote listing of applicable technologies.
Shallowness. Overall, I felt the text covered topics just enough to convince a reader of the author's proficiency but not enough to transmit insight or at least the hairy details. For example, in Chapter 10, Spread is discussed as a technology for reliable multicasting of logging information. Good idea! And I know a little bit about Spread including the fact that Spread doesn't provide flow control, which means if a client can't keep up, data gets lost. I have to imagine this limitation is an issue in large scale websites, but no mention in the book. It felt like the discussion barely scraped the surface of the topic. I wonder how many of the other sections similarly lacked depth.
No images?! On the cover is a brazen black band in the corner with "The Flickr Way". I think there's exactly one image in the book, a poor photo at that. This is irony. It's also another area where Building Scalable... falls short in comparison to Philip and Alex's... . The images in that book, while astoundingly superfluous (depending on your sense of humor), were also astoundingly beautiful and helped break up the text of Philip's book, which never seemed to drag for me.

In short, I felt myself nodding off way too much, for small nuggets of wisdom. I'd still recommend purchasing the book, but more as a reference and case study to occasionally peek at and get a start at tackling a tough issue. However, you'll have to go to other texts when you eventually have to dig deeper. But what do I know. I didn't build Flickr.

Efimova: AAAI '06 Weblog Papers

2006-06-15T09:09:00-04:00

Lilia Efimova collected links to papers presented at the AAAI 2006 Symposium on Computational Approaches to Analyzing Weblogs.

Speaking of the AAAI Weblog Symposium, some organizers from that meeting and the WWW '06 Weblog Ecosystem Symposium have banded together to launch a new standalone weblog conference: the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (site down as of this writing). The conference will first meet in March '07, with a submission deadline of November '06, if I remember correctly.

Wyman: PubSub in Trouble

2006-06-15T08:58:00-04:00

Fooey. Looks like the PubSub company is in trouble and may have to close its doors soon. Like other search companies, they were having a tough time dealing with spam, and they never had a really sexy consumer facing product. The concepts and implementation of standing search combined with real-time notification, through a number of mechanisms, is a good idea, and well worth pursuing. A rich, new syndication ecosystem could be built on top of that foundation.

Nullsoft: Open Source AVS

2006-06-14T09:12:00-04:00

With "copious spare time" due to the closeout of our spring quarter, I got to digging around in some old software gathering dust on a harddrive here and there. For a few years running I had students in my second quarter, intro programming course extend a plug-in for Winamp. My kludgy code to get them going sufficed for its purpose but I was always amazed by the Advanced Visual Studio (AVS) plug-in. Spectacular visual effects with an extremely minimal data model and programming language. I'm not sure the AVS language is even Turing complete.

Last year, Nullsoft open sourced the plug-in code for AVS. I've always wondered about the core of what is essentially a programmable, real-time image processing engine. That should be an interesting read for anyone interested doing computational art. Wonder how dependent on DirectX the code is.

Apropos of nothing, it seems like there's a Wikipedia entry for everything.

Offenhuber & Dirmoser: SemaSpace

2006-06-13T23:23:00-04:00

Link parkin': SemaSpace looks like an interesting interactive graph visualization tool.

[Via infosthetics]

System One: Wikipedia3

2006-06-13T23:14:00-04:00

The System One company has been converting the entire Wikipedia corpus into RDF. 47 million triples is a lot of data. A big heap o' XML data ready for machine manipulation. Drool.

The translation doesn't do incorporate Wikipedia article text, but as toxi points out big datasets for infoviz hacking aren't easy to come by.

Bumgardner: Building Tag Clouds

2006-06-12T20:35:00-04:00

There's a whole e-book on "Building Tag Clouds in Perl and PHP". $9.99 for 48 pages. I'm not sure the subject needs that many pages, but then again tag cloud generation is an interesting case study for scripting languages.

Bumgardner also makes some cases for why you'd want to use tag clouds, other than being a web hipster.

O'Reilly: Startup Cities

2006-06-12T20:25:00-04:00

Tim O'Reilly has an analysis of cities which are generating the most startups. The methodology could be suspect, but at least it's clearly documented. The obvious suspects, SF Bay Area, Boston, Seattle, NYC are leading the pack, but I wouldn't have guessed DC #5. Chicago is a respectable ninth, but probably not so hot amortized over the entire population. Ditto LA.

Borevitz: State of the Union Explorer

2006-06-11T21:06:00-04:00

Link parkin: Brad Borevitz's visualization of all of the US State of the Union Addresses. Borevitz also makes the source text of the addresses available.

NMH: NeWS Reminiscing

2006-06-09T23:12:00-04:00

Apropos of nothing, is it possible that time has caught up with NeWS? Given the Pythonic features and increased sophistication anticipated in the next edition of JavaScript, the ubiquity of Flash, and sophisticated languages implemented on the Java VM, a.k.a. applets, you've got multiple high-level engines with 2D rendering horsepower equivalent to PostScript. Granted these platforms have their own programming languages, but the NeWS extensions to PostScript were quite elegant and made for a darn good windowing system.

Leafing through The NeWS Book, and other histories of NeWS, I was struck how seemingly insignificant turns of fate have a big impact. Gosling helped port X10 to Sun hardware, and returned the source, eventually leading to The X Window Systems wide adoption on the UNIX platform. Essentially, Gosling shot himself in the foot.

Still waiting for the day we can have windows shaped to arbitrary paths.

Croft: Django Overview

2006-06-08T22:34:00-04:00

Speaking of Django, Jeff Croft has a nice overview of Django for non-programmers.

SixApart: MovableType 3.3

2006-06-08T22:30:00-04:00

I haven't been big into MovableType since I handed off a couple of sites that use 3.2. Creaky old NMH is still at 2.51

The new features of MovableType 3.3 look really juicy though. An improved plug-in mechanism and more extensibility of the admin interface were a couple of things I was really pining for.

Django or MT? MT or Django? Decisions, decisions.

NMH: Baseball Hacks in Hand

2006-06-06T23:15:00-04:00

After a pre-release sighting earlier this year, I kept in the back of my mind the notion to buy Joseph Adler's Baseball Hacks. I got my dirty little mitts on a copy today.

Scanning through it, the book basically has three phases:

Fundamentals of baseball and scoring
Retrieving statistics from the Web and getting them into a database or statistics package
Calculating all those statistics that SABRmetricians love

Pretty much what I anticipated, although I was surprised to find that there's actually a big hole in publicly available play-by-play data from 1992 to 1999 I believe. Otherwise, the book did indeed satisfy my itch for sources of raw data. As an O'Reilly "Hacks" book, it's doesn't appear to go into any one topic particularly deeply, which is fine. Although Statistics Hacks and a good intro stats books are probably good companions. In a riff on one of the books hacks, it looks like the game log data for other sports is readily scrapable off of sites like CBS Sportsline or ESPN.com. Hmmmmmm!

Poe: Perl6 Features

2006-06-06T22:57:00-04:00

I forced myself to learn Perl 5 a while ago, just so I could at least kvetch knowledgeably about the language. I wound up actually appreciating many of its features, although the OOP system and references are truly godawful.

The long promised Perl 6 may be arriving within our lifetimes, and given the feature set described by Curtis Poe I can only say one thing.

Common Lisp with Perl syntax is going to be really weird.

Honestly, he must have been kidding about that "Real, honest to goodness macros like LISP programmers enjoy,...", right. Right?! If not, that's one I have got to see. Macros and Algol syntax are like oil and water. If the Perl 6 guys have figured out a way to make it work, more power to 'em.

Greenspun's tenth law lives on.

Cutting, Cafarella, Bialecki: Hadoop

2006-06-05T22:59:00-04:00

Once upon a time, I called Google's MapReduce capability a force multiplier. Looks like the militia are going to get this capability sooner rather than later.

Doug Cutting, of Lucene and Nutch fame, along with Mike Cafarella and Andrzej Bialecki are developing Hadoop. Java based, Hadoop is open source, large scale, distributed computing infrastructure, including a MapReduce implementation on the come.

[Via Tim Bray]

WWW2006: Ecosystem Workshop Blog

2006-06-04T22:38:00-04:00

Part of NMH's outage was due to attendance at WWW 2006 where I had a workshop paper. The day after my presentation, I crashed the Weblogging Ecosystem Workshop. The workshop blog recaps the many excellent papers. A couple of other nuggets that came out regarding data to do experiments on. First, Intelliseek is extending the availability of the dataset provided for the workshop. Second, the venerable TREC put together a weblog test collection, housed at the University of Glasgow.

MS: Live Labs Grant Awards

2006-06-04T22:15:00-04:00

At the beginning of February, I noted the launch of Microsoft's Live Labs and an accompanying academic grant program.The winners have been announced. Brief descriptions of the awardees proposals are also available.

Since the key draw of the RFP was access to large scale query logs, data mining is a constantly recurring them although there is one winner investigating merging traditional search with del.icio.us style social search, and another project doing visualization of search results for health information.

De Bleser: NodeBox

2006-06-03T20:55:00-04:00

Recently I've been fantasizing about a processing-like environment, but built on top of Python instead of Java. Frederik De Bleser's NodeBox fits the bill. Mac OS only though. The NodeBox gallery has some pretty impressive stuff.

I've had a front row seat for the collapse of CS enrollment through five straight years of teaching the second quarter of our intro sequence. Now I'm thinking about alternative intro curricula that really get away from the command line/console straightjacket. I don't claim to be particularly original, but it seems to me you could carefully craft a set of courses that did the following:

Completely covers a standard ACM/IEEE CS Curriculum
Frames assignments in terms of interactive visual artifacts or media manipulation
Touches on the simple, but mind-blowing, concepts of CS, e.g: automata, complex networks, iterated function systems, multi-agent systems, etc.

At least at NU, our intro sequence is mired in the uninspiring minutiae of learning programming. Something like NodeBox looks like a good start to getting out of this trap. [Via Daniel Jalkut, via Rui Carmo's The Tao of Mac]

Serrano, Gallesio, Loitsch: HOP

2006-06-02T23:25:00-04:00

HOP is a language for programming the Web. My cursory scan indicates that the system has roughly the same architecture as OpenLaszlo for creating web apps. A domain specific language is compiled into a combination of client side DHTML code and server side business (in the broad sense) logic handlers. Scheme inside.

Looks like a neat framework, but the downer is that it can only target standards compliant browsers, a.k.a. anything besides IEs 5 and 6.

Gray & Voegels: Amazon Technology

2006-06-01T23:56:00-04:00

Turing Award Winner Jim Gray interviews Amazon CTO Werner Voegels for ACM Queue. Good insights ensue.

Just a morsel, but Amazon proves the adage: "any useful complex system is grown from a simple working system."

I've talked about "Google scale" problems, but there's also a whole bin of "Amazon scale" problems which might not have the same order of magnitude of data to deal with, but whose interactivity requirements make for very different engineering challenges.

Holovaty: Mizzou JSchool Commencement

2006-06-01T23:31:00-04:00

A few years ago I invited Adrian Holovaty to come to a seminar I organized here at Medill. The seminar was half baked but I'm glad to see Adrian recovered, made something of himself, and is lighting an entrepreneurial fire under some JSchool graduates.

NMH: The Hack is Back

2006-06-01T23:09:00-04:00

Okay, I've been on hiatus for long periods before, but this is the first time the site has actually been down for a while. I got a sense that a feeling of panic was creeping throughout my vast audience. Anyhoo, a failing hard drive, a heap of travel, and the end of the quarter conspired to take creaky old costarica off the air and keep it that way for a few weeks. (Research tech support at NU? Shyah, right!).

Thankfully, the hard drive decided to make one last stand before I had to perform major surgery. New Media Hack has been backed up in all its glory so if/when the disk bites the bullet I'm in good shape to recover. Whew! I may just go proactive and cobble together a replacement machine when the quarter is over at the end of next week.

So you haven't quite gotten rid of me yet!! Heck, I think my Google ranking even went up

Novell: Open Source FLAIM

2006-05-04T23:31:00-04:00

FLAIM is an embeddable database engine ala' Sleepycat's Berkeley DB. FLAIM is interesting in that it looks like it also provides a query language and indexing on the DB contents. Plus there's XFLAIM which looks to be an XML store on top of FLAIM. Novell has open sourced FLAIM and XFLAIM.

Wonder if there's a Python binding.

[Via Hack the Planet]

MusicStrands: Applied Research Labs

2006-05-03T23:26:00-04:00

MusicStrands is a music recommendation site and system akin to last.fm. There's a plug-in that you add to iTunes that watches what you listen to, and forwards observations to MusicStrands' servers. Then new music is recommended to you. MusicStrands also incorporates tagging and playlist sharing, encouraging social stickiness.

Who knew that they had an applied research lab? They not only document whizzy new features in MusicStrands, but publis the occasional technical paper. Torrens, Hertzog, and Arcos have one on music visualization (PDF), while Baccigalupo and Plaza are applying case-based reasoning to playlist recommendation (PDF). Kewl!!

Linden: Spotback

2006-05-02T23:35:00-04:00

Greg Linden spotted the newest kid on the personalized news block: Spotback. Spotback's "twist" is that ratings drive the personalization. I found Linden's take surprisingly positive although he did find the recommendations a bit off.

The key problem is that rating is work. In this context, it's work for non-obvious impact. If you rate a bunch of stuff how do you know you're getting better personalized results? I know the last thing I want to do when I'm surfing is rate stuff for the benefit of some opaque ghost in the machine. And this doesn't even touch the issues around dealing with cheaters. Vote early, vote often as we say in Chicago!

Since this personalization transparency issue is becoming a hobby horse of mine, maybe I should hunker down and do some literature review to see how the recommender system and information filtering communities evaluate the quality of their results. I'm starting to think that the best such engine would convince me not that it had "more good stuff" but guaranteed that it "always had the important stuff".

Sphere: Now Live

2006-05-01T23:42:00-04:00

Well I guess that answered my question! Sphere ain't zombied. In fact it's quite live.

Now if I could only see what the win is. Oh sure, the Sphere folks have some nice claims, but other than UI goodness, how do I know their search results are great? Heck, I don't even have a clue what they're indexing.

Python: 2.5 New Features

2006-04-11T23:53:00-04:00

Figures. I have my copy of Python Essential Reference (3rd edition) for a week, and it's immediately outdated as Python 2.5 goes to alpha. Sigh.

The new features in Python 2.5 look really interesting though. As I tell my scripting languages class, while enterprise neanderthals and programming semantics snobs may give these languages short shrift, there's actually a fair amount of language design that goes into their evolution. Perl might look all gnarled and mangy, but it looks that way on purpose! Ha, ha. Only serious.

Anyhoo, at a glance the coolest additions are the inclusion of the etree module, for XML processing, and sqlite3, a lightweight, embeddable RDBMS system. If the Python junta is going that route, they should just include pycurl to replace the somewhat archaic urllib2. Core Python, pycurl, etree, sqlite3, and bsddb start to make a nice platform for webfeed aggregation straight of the box, although a reimagining of Pilgrim's Universal Feed Parser in ElementTree would be nice.

NMH: SOS Sphere?

2006-04-10T23:25:00-04:00

After all that fanfare, does anyone know if Sphere is still alive? Any plans to actually move out of closed beta? Zombied and we just don't know it? What's the scoop?

Enquring minds want to know!

NMH: A Precis Engine

2006-04-09T22:08:00-04:00

Thinking out loud. I'd like an engine that I could give a URL and would return a precis of web documents related to the URL. Sort of like how link:url works on Google and other search engines, except with more smarts. Technorati is in the right direction for blog posts, at least when it actually works. But it doesn't tell you much more than what links to the post and some notion of related links.

This is hard for the entire web of URLs but would be really useful in some restricted domains. For example, what if you had an engine that simply looked for content related to every piece of legislation in the US House and Senate. Then I just plug in a URL for a particular bill (the engine would have an easily understood way to construct such a URL, e.g. http://example.com/congress/109/house/1234) and get back a page that summarizes related bills, information about the key politicians involved, analysis from government agencies and non-profit institutions, relevant news stories from across the country, and highly relevant content found on the web, including weblogs and other discussion.

Actually, the URLs don't even have to map to documents but relatively obvious concepts, for example stocks.

This precis engine concept relies on focusing the Web to a small, finite set of documents, easily mappable to URLs, and only crawling and searching for information about those documents. The technology is currently well within our reach and reminds me to take a look at what's been happening in the focused crawler community.

Of course, I've sort of reinvented Topix.net, but instead of straight news about a topic, the precis engine would tend towards a Wikipedia page's content, despite using alternative methods to build the encylopedic page.

Barr: S3 Activity

2006-04-08T14:11:00-04:00

Despite my attestation that S3 isn't a game changer, it looks like there's going to be some interesting activity around Amazon's cheap, network storage service. Jeff Barr has a roundup of some recent developments.

Apropos of Elle Driver: "You know I've always liked that word... attestation ... so rarely get to use it in a sentence."

NMH: Nickelodeon Programming

2006-04-08T14:07:00-04:00

You know you still retain a bit of your PLDI roots when you see the following title in your aggregator:

Nickelodeon Continues Multiplatform Programming Experiments; Commits To Multi-million Dollar Development Slate

and think "Why the heck does Nickelodeon have a programming languages research group?"

;-/

Topix.net: Forums and Citizen's Journalism

2006-04-06T09:55:00-04:00

Full disclosure, this post was mainly prompted by an e-mail from Rich Skrenta, Topix.net's CEO, although I had his posts bookmarked for further review.

There's been a couple of interesting effects around Topix's introduction of forums beside their automated news gathering tools. First, they ditched forum registration and participation went up along with quality. Second, the forum for Caruthersville,MO became a coordination spot for citizens after a series of deadly storms and a tornado ripped through the small town.

I'm not sure I'd call the forum citizen's journalism as Rich does, but I agree with the tail of his post where a challenge of the modern news organization is to "enrich and enable communities of readers with voices of their own." Topix is demonstrating effective engineering of discussion forums in conjunction with news. As Vin Crosbie points out, cesspool forums is a tired old story that still crops up (cf Washington Post) in the news industry. Any new paradigms to deal with the problem should be warmly greeted.

I wonder if Topix could use some of its blog mining techniques on forums to surface and highlight really useful forum posts. I'll leave unanswered how to measure utility, but at that point I'd really start to call the forums citizen's journalism.

NMH: Stupid Date Meme Study

2006-04-05T00:00:00-04:00

I refuse to link to that stupid "counting date" meme that's running around the blogosphere, or even provide an example because the concept is so content free. Seriously, a moment in time, when formatted according to some arbitrary human standard, looks like an ordered string of numbers. AND?!

The mind boggles.

But! some enterprising blog tracking company should do a study of where the dang thing emerged and how it spread and present the results as some form of social network analysis. The tricky bit is trying to estimate a causal event that motivated a particular blogger to post the meme, but solving such problems is half the fun. I mean where are those HP, Blogpulse, Technorati, and memetracking folks when you really need em!

Ha, ha. Only serious

NewsGator: REST API

2006-04-04T23:39:00-04:00

NewsGator is a company that has a collection of webfeed aggregators. NewsGator's web based aggregator provides a Web API, principally for synchronizing reader status across the family of products. Note that the products are actually pretty good including NetNewsWire and FeedDemon, but the API, being SOAP based, wasn't particularly friendly, at least to these eyes.

Or at least until now. The NewsGator API has been recast into REST (PDF). NewsGator online becomes one of the few (only?) web based aggregators with a lightweight Web API that supports modifying the shared state at a fine granularity. (Please!! Correct me if I'm wrong. Acking UserLand based aggregators that support XML-RPC).

The nut is that NewsGator becomes another interesting aggregation platform, like endo, where background processing stuff can usefully interrogate and drive really good clients. We're creeping closer to putting some hackability into the DailyMe.

[Via Kevin Burton]

ZoomCloud: Outsourced Tagcloud

2006-04-03T23:53:00-04:00

Link parkin': ZoomClouds is an outsourced tag cloud service, derived from webfeeds + the Y! content analysis service. Apparently there's an API to boot.

[Via Jeff Barr]

P.S. I'm not dead yet. Light posting is due to not seeing much really interesting going on in the tech world and a lot of work locally.

NMH: Memetracker Transparency

2006-03-15T23:10:00-05:00

With the addition of OPML seeding in aggregators like TailRank and Megite, memetrackers seem to be slowly drifting towards my vision of focused crawlers in aggregators. I like the direction things are going, but have an issue with transparency in these systems.

Maybe it's just the geek in me, but I'd like to have some way to investigate how such systems decide on what to serve up on my behalf. As it is, I can't tell whether they're any better than random. For example, in addition to a hidden algorithm, memeorandum doesn't even reveal its sources. Megite has generated a bunch of pages for me, presumably customized, but I have a hard time distinguishing anything different from what I would have seen in my aggregator.

To put it simply, how do we know these systems aren't just big old Wizard of Oz experiments, "Pay no attention to the man behind the mirror." I admit this is something of a power user/prosumer issue, but this camp can serve to generate confidence amongst the unquestioning masses.

And of course the next thing I'll be asking for is some knobs on the things so I can tweak them, but you can't get greedy.

Amazon: S3

2006-03-14T23:51:00-05:00

Just a few thoughts on Amazon's new web service S3, which is cheap, reliable, plentiful Internet based storage.

S3 is not a game changer.

To me it seems appropriate for boutique applications or proofs of concepts, but you wouldn't bet the ranch on it. I did a back of the envelope calculation on what 1 terabyte of data (a nice round size and the point at which this really matters) would cost on a monthly basis. Your first month, storage and transfer is roughly $360. Every month thereafter you're paying about $150. After about 5 months, you've forked over enough for one of LaCie's rackmount, network attached terabytes which costs $899. That 5 months is if you never transfer any of those stored bytes, so it's a lower bound on your cost. I know it's not quite apples to apples, since you'd really want to do RAID and possibly some clustering, but the gist is still the same: commercial, off the shelf, network attached storage is competitive with S3.

The upside of the LaCie is that you can park it as close as you want to your computation. If you're using S3 for anything more sophisticated than a dumping ground, and/or not planning to peer close to Amazon's routers, expect to do some serious cache engineering to deal with the Internet latency and congestion between you and S3. The LaCie also has standard network filesystem interfaces. To access your storage on S3 you've got REST and SOAP.

The upside of S3 is that they guarantee 99.99% availability and you don't have to deal with backups. And I am in no way pooh-poohing this cost savings.

So what you're paying for on an ongoing basis is the removal of a certain amount of engineering hassle and replacing it with others. I don't think you can build the whizzy, large scale, interactive web applications that folks are fantasizing about on top of S3, without a lot of smarts. At which point you might as well build your own cheap knockoff of S3, and own your own wheel.

But it would be a gas to build a tuple space frontend to S3 and run with it.

By the by, I wonder if Alexa Web Search has generated anything interesting.

Pilgrim: Encoding Detector

2006-03-13T23:49:00-05:00

Total geek post forthcoming. I've been doing a lot of webfeed crawling and parsing development recently. Due to the heinous abuse of character encoding declarations out there, I had to rip off some encoding detection Python code from Mark Pilgrim's Universal Feed Parser. (Don't worry it's legal.) While grinding my teeth, I was wishing there was a way to just hand off a string to some function and have it guess what the encoding was.

Oops. Problem solved.

NMH: Good Software Experiences

2006-03-09T23:44:00-05:00

After my travails with hardware falling over last week, I've actually had a pretty good week with software. Herewith, three short anecdotes.

One bugaboo of desktop Linux back around the turn of the century, was dealing with printers. That old UNIX chestnut, lpr, just didn't play well with modern printers. Today I ventured to use my network printer with my Ubuntu desktop to print out some technical papers. Suffice it to say, the printer control panel pleasantly surprised me with a two step process for configuration. In no time, I was printing out PDFs with one click. Duplex even!

Through an automated script I've been meticulously recording information regarding Flickr's interestingness for the past five weeks. The data is stored in a Berkeley DB and resulted in a 1.6 gigabyte file. Accessing the data was dog slow though. After a careful reading of the documentation, creating a new db tuned to the properties of the data, and converting the data over, I've got a db that's 1/3 the size and fast as all get out. This took the better part of an hour or two but was well worth it. Most of the time was spent redesigning the db scheme and waiting for the conversion to complete.

I have a webfeed crawler, mostly written in Python, that records all content that it retrieves. There's a fair amount of redundancy between most fetches. I wanted a way to calculate deltas between versions and simply store the deltas. After digging around on the web for various algorithms to do this, and dreading implementing any of them, turns out Python has a nice module, difflib, that fits the bill. The SequenceMatcher class is really handy. Talk about batteries included!!

kula: endo

2006-03-09T23:24:00-05:00

I don't know if Adriaan Tijsseling is the brains behind kula, but it's good bet since they seem to be the home of ecto and 1001.

In any event endo looks like a worthy competitor to NetNewsWire, which is the best of the RSS aggregators I've used. I'm really interested in the extensibility features. A clean, full-featured plug-in architecture combined with good AppleScript support means a wide latitude for experimentation. And the feed management tools look like a nice departure from the current "three pane/river of news" dichotomy.

endo's probably worth shelling out $18.00, at least if you're on a Mac.

Uckan: MonitorThis

2006-03-09T00:28:00-05:00

Link parkin': Alp Uckan's MonitorThis takes a bunch of search terms and generates a bunch of urls to 30+ searchable engines. The results come back in the machine readable OPML format to munge as you please.

Apologies for not getting the accent correct in Alp's last name.

Via Marshall Kirkpatrick at The Social Software Blog

Webb: playsh

2006-03-09T00:21:00-05:00

playsh seems very interesting according to Matt Webb's description of the MOO-like environment.Quote:

playsh is a MOO-like text environment that runs on your local computer. The basic object types and verbs are based on LambdaMOO. It's organised geographically, so you can walk north and south and so on. You have a player, so you can take and drop items. You can create new things and dig to new rooms, and there are verbs attached to all of these. There are ssh interfaces so you can connect to playsh from other computers, and other folks can connect to your playsh instance from their own.

playsh is implemented in Python and the game's interactive language is prototype based, ala Self and io, with a couple of neat twists: per-player perspectives on objects, and web resources cleanly incorporated. The only downside, from my perspective, is the big inhale of other toolkits. The thought of installing Twisted always gives me the willies.

Bricklin: When The Long Tail Wags The Dog

2006-03-07T23:56:00-05:00

Digesting Dan Bricklin's "When The Long Tail Wags The Dog" takes a long time, but is well worth it. Bricklin makes an argument for generalized tools being the big winners in hyperabundant, hyperdifferntiated economies, commonly referred to as Long Tail markets. If you don't track this stuff, read as "market with a ton of niche product of high value only to a small audience." The club DJ 12" vinyl dance record market might be an example. In any event, Bricklin's argument rest on general tools providing a wider array of options, including any unanticipated capabilities that you might want.

Extrapolating Bricklin's argument to webfeed aggregators, an extremely flexible aggregator that exhibited one or two compelling uses out of the box could be a big winner. So all the meme-tracking tools might be barking up the wrong tree in the long run. Then again, designing for extensiblity in an aggregator is still in its infancy, and designing for extensibility in general is hard.

Cal Students: Victoria Hack

2006-03-07T00:01:00-05:00

My Cal brethren pulled a good one on a USC basketball player. Nothing like using IM to invent a fictitious babe, name Victoria, chatting up the opposition, Gabe Pruitt, and rattling Pruit mid game to good effect.

Of course others might suggest the prank a little on, if not past, the edge but I put it in the Robin Ficker category of deviantly inspired mischief. Ah the mircles of the modern Internet.

Buterbaugh & Dennis: matchr

2006-03-06T23:30:00-05:00

Ryan Buterbaugh, a CS undergrad here at NU working on a combined BS/MS, has brought to life a couple of half-baked ideas I've had about leveraging some of the usable exhaust emanating from Flickr.

matchr is a Flickr puzzle game. The short story is we take a set of eight Flickr tags, randomly select photos labeled with those tags (two per tag), construct a 4 by 4 grid of thumbnails, and ask users to figure out which photos have the same tag. The puzzles are surprisingly difficult, especially depending on which tags are selected. Really generic tags have an amazingly broad range of attached visual imagery.

What's the point from a research angle? Well, matchr allows users to form their own groups, pick their own tag sets, and essentially create new media artifacts from Flickr photos. Puzzles are scored based upon number of match guesses and time to completion. We're interested in understanding how such game construction and playing would fit into a system like Flickr, as an additional means to motivate and encourage participation. There are a few in-system Flickr games and social activities, like deleteme, Squared Circle, and "Day in the Life", but Flickr wasn't really designed to support social activities where folks can build new constructs. matchr is a small prototype to see what happens when such activities are more explicitly supported.

matchr is a bit more involved than other games like fastr, but we hope it's also a bit more engaging over the long term. That said we know there's more work to do, and are open to constructive criticism. If you're a long term NMH reader and want to do us favor, a link would be great.

NMH: E-mail & Web apps

2006-03-02T23:36:00-05:00

Is it just me, or should a Web application that sends e-mail be ready to receive it? Blackboard was the first application to irritate me with this bug. It's bad enough I have to suffer through a horrid Web interface, and edit messages in a text area, but then people can't respond to the message!

I thought it might just be Blackboard, but Basecamp has the same dysfunction. Comment notifications can be e-mailed to you, but you can't e-mail back. If you'd like to respond, from within your nice comfy e-mail app, for which you have a ton of muscle memory, you have to click on a link, wait for your browser to come up, maybe log in, find the response area, and then edit your response in one of the world's worst editors (again, the text area).

Makes me want to participate in the conversation!!

This is a plea then, for someone to come up with a good Web app idiom where you can e-mail to the conversation, sort of like, gasp!, a mailing list. Besides, it might actually lead to more active and efficient conversations.

Ferrier: Ajax + REST

2006-03-01T23:43:00-05:00

In his article Using REST with Ajax, Nic Ferrier highlights an interesting property of the XmlHttpRequest object used in browser side JavaScript. The object can use all of the HTTP verbs, which is impossible to do from straight HTML. So in some sense Ajax makes REST implementations of Web services easier and vice versa. If you need to use PUT and DELETE as part of your REST protocol, then a client side UI can take advantage of all the standard idioms.

Learn something new every day.

Steward: ListMixer

2006-02-28T23:42:00-05:00

ListMixer is a meta-social bookmark service. You post bookmarks to it and then can easily forward it on to other services like del.icio.us (clean ui, very popular) or Furl (caches bookmarked pages). Another feature of ListMixer is timed existence for bookmarks. If you don't revisit the link within a set amount of time, it gets deleted.

A nice combination of some simple, but potentially quite effective, ideas courtesy of Sid Steward.

Via Marshall Kirkpatrick at The Social Software Blog

Chen: Megite

2006-02-26T22:45:00-05:00

For whatever reason, Megite's Matthew Chen solicited me as a beta test for the personalized news site. What the heck? So now I have a personalized news page based upon my Bloglines subscriptions. We'll see how it goes, although I have to admit, I went through the same process with TailRank and haven't revisited that site since registration. I think I'll have to subscribe to both of my personalized feeds in Bloglines.

NMH: Ubuntu Impressions

2006-02-26T22:38:00-05:00

Me and computers haven't been getting along very well recently. My laptop croaked, my grad student's laptop croaked, my desktop motherboard keeled over, the Windows XP install on the desktop harddrive only boots in old hardware, and a power supply on an important research machine bought the farm. Sigh!

In any event, I rescued the Windows XP drive, and plugged it into an older unused machine. Meanwhile, having had enough of XP for a while, I installed Ubuntu Linux on the old machine's disk. Wow! Desktop Linux has come a long way since I made my last pass at living in front of UNIX about 5 years ago. Note that I use a lot of UNIX machines, just haven't sat in front of one on a daily basis for a long time.

The installation was smooth as silk and in under an hour I had a nice graphical desktop that recognized all of my hardware. OpenOffice was installed by default, so I could deal with the inevitable MS Office attachments. Even after I added a cannabalized graphics card and some memory, post-install, the system was straightforwardly updated. There was even a couple of easy to install packages that supported accessing my iPod with no fuss.

Obviously, the true test will be continued use, so call me back in a month to see how things are going. And I still believe MacOS X is the best solution for us UNIX heads who don't want to think hard about a GUI and professional office applications. However, Ubuntu, and I have to believe a number of other Linux distributions, are well past the bleeding edge stage now. This is especially important for disadvantaged or underfunded groups who might be stretching their computing budget by buying or receiving two generation old equipment.

Carden & Schmidt: processing hacks

2006-02-25T23:05:00-05:00

Somehow I get the feeling that there's this odd alternative universe of fun, artistic programming and hacking built around the processing environment. Tom Carden and Karsten Schmidt's processing hacks wiki is just further confirmation.

Lamantia: NextGen TagClouds

2006-02-24T23:48:00-05:00

Now that tagging is all the rage, tag clouds, weighted lists of tags, are becoming a more frequently encountered user interface device. For a weblog visualization project I'm working on, I pondered for a half a second using tag clouds liberally, but didn't have time to think through the details.

Fortunately, Joe Lamantia did have the time. In a two part series, he delves into the semantic underpinnings of tag clouds, and future directions for the design and application of tag clouds. There's a little too much background material for me, since I'm steeped in the stuff, but the thinking is definitely going down an interesting avenue. The main point is that variations of tag clouds will start to exhibit more interface elements to understand the context in which the cloud was generated, or even interactively control the cloud contents. I especially like consideration of incorporating temporal dynamics into tag clouds, a.l.a Oliver Steele's Expialidocio.us.

Updated to correct the outbound links.

Sandler: FeedTree + Coral == Calcium

2006-02-23T23:54:00-05:00

I've been lax in tracking what's going on with FeedTree, the Rice research project looking at P2P mechanisms for distributing webfeed content. A quick glance at the FeedTree weblog indicates healthy activity, including Calcium, a Python program which gateways FeedTree content into the Coral CDN (content distribution network, think Akamai). Projects like FeedTree can help alleviate bandwidth issues when a weblog publisher gets Slashdotted or otherwise stampeded.

Metcalfe: coComment Forking

2006-02-22T23:27:00-05:00

Ben Metcalfe brings up something I hadn't thought of in relation to coComment, the weblog comment tracking service. coComment forks conversations, meaning it constructs a, possibly, alternative version of the comment stream. For example, on a site a comment might be moderated, edited, or even deleted by the site owner. But since comment "registration" with coComment is the purview of the comment author, coComment may still attribute the comment to the host site. Also, and I did pick up on this when I first heard about coComment, is that it only reflects the comments of those users registered with coComment and conscientious enough to use it regularly.

This arguably makes conversations on weblogs worse rather than better. I know I'm driving up VHS (blogs) vs Betamax (Usenet) Lane, but this is yet another example of reinventing Usenet, except worse. The only hope I really saw was in the comments to Metcalfe's posts, where someone proposed the use of a microformat standard to mark comments. Then a weblog search engine could intelligently aggregate the comments without circumventing the site owners prerogative.

And just as an aside, where are all those folks who were indignant about not letting blog authors opt out of Google's AutoLink, Microsoft's ActiveWords, or Third Voice? It's not apples to apples, since coComment doesn't purport to display content alongside the original site (yet it's an easy toolbar button away), but still you can argue that this eliminates some control of a blog's content by the author.

It all boils down to who owns the comment: the author or the hoster.

Of course, coComment is probably going on to wild success given my ability to predict the future.

Steele: reAnimator

2006-02-21T23:52:00-05:00

reAnimator is a Web based tool for exploring regular expressions. Oliver Steele built it out of Python and OpenLaszlo.

As Trinity said in Matrix Revolutions, with an appropriate amount of detached cool, "That's a neat trick."

Did ya miss me

Cannasse: haXe

2006-02-09T23:56:00-05:00

As a follow up project to the MTASC, the Motion-Twin ActionScript Compiler, Nick Cannasse has been working on haXe, a language that can be compiled to Flash, DHTML, or mod_neko, a VM embedded in an Apache plugin.

The mind boggles. A high-level JavaScript like language that compiles to virtual machines embedded in within a browser or webserver. What? No Java virtual machine? Given haXe's heritage, it can't be that hard to implement translation of a simplified version of Python in a similar fashion. Don't know if it would be worth the trouble though.

Willison: Summit Recaps

2006-02-08T17:12:00-05:00

Simon Willison is contributing to and collecting text summaries of speakers at The Future of Web Apps Summit, taking place across the pond in London, UK. Some notable speakers, from my perspective, already recorded: Joshua Schachter, Tom Coates, and Cal Henderson.

NMH: On coComment

2006-02-08T00:33:00-05:00

I'm not much of a blog comment fan, viewing blog comments as a distant shadow of Usenet, which despite its faults worked amazingly well. So take the following with a grain of salt.

coComment is a comment tracking tool and community which purports to gather all the comments of its users across the blogosphere into one place. For each user, it gives a nice little AJAXy display of all the comments they've made. For a blog, you get a similar presentation of all comments from coComment participants.

I can't figure out whether to file this under solipsism or narcissism.

However, the developers have set themselves up with an interesting Google style problem. I may scoff at the utility, but I have to imagine "organizing the world's comments" is fairly difficult.

You know I've always liked that word... "solipsism" ..., so rarely have an opportunity to use it in a sentence.

MS: Feeds API

2006-02-07T23:44:00-05:00

Embedded in the Microsoft's next OS release, Vista, is a Feeds API. Looks like a centralized combination of feed retrieval tools and subscription information storage.

Upsides: less work for application developers, probably can be easily scripted, wide adoption, Outlook will sync with the subscription store, wide deployment if not adoption

Downsides: information leakage across applications, pre-determined data model with no apparent extension capabilities

Still, you might be able to build the Emacs of aggregators on top of this some day.

UCB SIMS: InfoSys 141

2006-02-06T23:34:00-05:00

Webcast archives of the UCB SIMS course InfoSys 141? Good!!

Archive in evil Real format? Bad!

But the suffering just might be worth it to hear from Peter Norvig, Susan Dumais, Hal Varian, and Sergey Brin, amongst others, in discussion led by Marti Hearst.

Crosbie: Identity 2.0

2006-02-06T23:27:00-05:00

I haven't been closely following many of the efforts to build new identity mechanisms into the web. I leave that to other folks and plan on riding their coattails when The Right Thing comes along.

In a quite entertaining parable, Vin Crosbie lays out why one should be keeping an eye on Dick Hardt, Sxip, and Identity 2.0.

MS: Live Labs Academic Grants

2006-02-03T22:49:00-05:00

Microsoft recently announced that they're forming a couple of new lablets, Search and Live, the second under the direction of Gary Flake. Both labs are intended to better connect to the academic research community MS's research and business units focused on search and internet applications. They're even giving out some decent chunks of change, in the form of grants.

Here's one suggestion. Pay some one to port the MSN Search SDK into a form usable by the open source scripting languages: Python, Perl, Php, Ruby. As it is, you're stuck with a ridiculous inhale of MS dev tools if you just want to kick the tires and see how good or bad the dang thing is. Not good for adoption.

By the by, Live Labs looks like it has a nice collection of interesting researchers in place including Susan Dumais, Eric Horvitz, and Doug Terry. Then again, the full roster gives off a whiff of one of those university centers/programs where there's 40 affiliated faculty, 10 participate at all, and 5 do all the work.

Hawk: 30 Boxes Review

2006-02-02T23:55:00-05:00

30 Boxes has, or will have, the blogorati in a tizzy shortly. The web app is a calendaring tool that apparently will employ many of your favorite Meme Who's Name Shall Not Be Uttered features, slickly executed: tags, AJAX, social mechanisms. Pseudonymous tech chronicler Thomas Hawk has one of a canonical overview of 30 Boxes in its current pre-release state.

One interesting point of 30 Boxes is the mechanisms it uses to implement social boundaries. From my read of the review, access control is implemented using a combination of buddy lists and tags. I've been thinking that buddy lists are the only widely adopted and accessible tool for end user access control and should be applied in just about every piece of social software. The combination with tags though is just brilliant. The tags make it relatively easy to say what elements of your personal calendar others can access. In fact, the tags support a flexible grouping mechanism that should allow users to settle on the right groupings for their usage. No tyranny of one size fits all granularity as in UNIX's owner/group/other model. We'll see how the combination holds up when it meets the real world.

Also, as folks start to realize that tags make a great collecting and labeling tool, we'll see more applications besides the holy manna of bottom up categorization attributed to folksonomies.

You know I've always liked that word... "pseudonymous" ..., so rarely have an opportunity to use it in a sentence

Graham: Free On Lisp

2006-02-01T23:18:00-05:00

Paul Graham's On Lisp is a classic on the power of the Lisp programming language, and more importantly, how you can mold the language to a specific problem domain. The text fell out of print, but he recovered the copyright and is making On Lisp freely available in electronic form.

[Via Have Browser, Will Travel]

Carden: diu flow

2006-01-31T23:24:00-05:00

When Bloglines has it's act together, I like the links that come across from Tom Carden's del.icio.us feed. They mostly focus on interactive graphics, information visualization, computational aesthetics, and processing.

van Wingerde: virtual journal club

2006-01-31T00:33:00-05:00

virtual journal clubs are a damn good idea:

Every Friday I pick a paper from the ACM Digital Library that is found by the search term +connected +2005 +"mobile device" +"user interface", and write a brief discussion of it. Why? Because it makes me actually read them.

Every first year graduate student should be forced to do this on a specific topic, plus add a bookmark to a departmental social bookmarking service, applying some appropriate tags. Senior grad students should be assigned to review the discussions on a rotating basis.

[Via 106 Miles to Chicago (White Sox are still WS Champs!!)]

Yahoo!: Netrospective

2006-01-31T00:16:00-05:00

Link parkin': Yahoo!'s visualization of the "top 100 Web moments" according to them.

[Via infosthetics]

Linden: Link Fu

2006-01-30T23:57:00-05:00

In addition to his entertaining series of posts on the early Amazon days, Greg Linden also had a couple of other good dispatches. One on RSS suckage, pointing out that aggregators need to proactively help folks cut through the noise. Another is just a nice pile of links on information retrieval research literature, a couple of which were new to me. I've been working my way through Managing Gigabytes. I don't really need all the compression but the stuff on indexing and retrieval is great.

NMH: Weblogging Data Challenge

2006-01-30T23:41:00-05:00

So I've complained before about open data sets for weblog researchers and hackers. Be careful what you wish for...

I received the challenge data for the 2006 Weblogging Ecosystem Workshop. The first day of the set is a 200 odd MB compressed file that expands to over 900 MB. Yowsa!! And there's 17 days of this stuff.

Suffice it to say you can't just slurp the whole mess into an in-memory datastructure and start noodling about. Gonna have to creatively splice this iceberg into somewhat more manageable chunks.

NMH: Egosurfing

2006-01-29T22:39:00-05:00

Apropos of absolutely noting, I'm back to #1 in the Google rankings for "media hack" and "Brian Dennis". This despite competition from Wired News on the first front, and a prominent English composer on the second. Apparently though, it looks like Wired News columnist Adam Penenberg has actually moved all of his web writing over to Slate.

Score one for frills free blogging. Or something like that.

In other news, a few deadlines and commitments have passed so expect a bit of bloggorhea from your humble writer as I flush a bunch of links locked in Bloglines "Keep New" purgatory. Really, I wish they'd come up with a less click intensive way to clip an item.

jwz: xlib on MacOS X

2006-01-29T22:23:00-05:00

As someone who hacked an Xlib library for OS/2 on the 286, I salute the mobiness of Jamie Zawinski's essentially doing a port of Xlib to Quartz, the Mac OS X native graphics library. This is make life nice for all of those legacy xscreensaver modules. Yowsa!!

[Via The Tao of Mac]

Sinha: Social Analysis of Tagging

2006-01-25T00:09:00-05:00

Link parkin': Rashmi Sinha's A social analysis of tagging.

[Via Jack Vinson who's been on a roll with a lot of thoughtful posts that outlink to interesting stuff]

NMH: Collaborative News Proliferation

2006-01-25T00:03:00-05:00

NewsVine, reddit, digg, memeorandum, TailRank, News Alloy, CommonTimes, not to mention old greybeards Slashdot and Plastic. Is there really that much demand for socially customized news out there?

More importantly, are there enough ad dollars to support them all? I think I'm with Steve Rubel on this one, shakeout approaching.

A particular theme I'm waiting to see play out is responses to The Tyranny of the Crowd. As far as I know, all of these sites work for one large to vast set of participants.

I still haven't figured out why no one has gone meta and let users define and manage smaller communities with their own sets of sources and restrict the algorithms to those smaller groups. This would probably make the personalization algorithms more viable, at the cost of not having enough participant data, and having to come up with decent designs for managing social boundaries. Talk about targeted ad buys though!!

Adler: Baseball Hacks

2006-01-23T22:58:00-05:00

O'Reilly has a "Baseball Hacks" title, authored by Joseph Adler, scheduled to appear Feb 2006. Hearkening back to my sports data vizzing post, it looks like Baseball Hacks might have the pointers for the raw data which I've always known was out there, but didn't quite know how to find.

[Via Brian Carnell]

NMH: Mic Checka

2006-01-18T22:57:00-05:00

One two, one two!

Is this thing still on?!

Here's to three years of cranking out new media hackery; comment free, ad free, spam free, trackback free, blogroll free, tagcloud free, and some would say content free ;-)

Ciao, ciao for now!

Hurst: Data Mining

2006-01-16T23:36:00-05:00

Link parkin': Matthew Hurst's Data Mining, weblog. Hurst is a senior research scientist for Intelliseek, the folks behind Blogpulse.

Steele: expialidocio.us

2006-01-12T23:05:00-05:00

expialidocio.us is a neat visualization of one's del.icio.us tags. Cooked up by Oliver Steele, using OpenLaszlo, the widget let's interact with a sliding temporal window over your del.icio.us tags. A tag cloud is generated from the bookmarks that fall within the window.

A nice prototype (?) that leads the mind in various directions. The tag cloud takes up a lot of real estate, and it could be put to more use. For example, if I hover over a tag the slices of the timeline that cover that tag could be highlighted. Also, I might provide some chunking in the timeline, so I could discern patterns in bookmarking behavior. Maybe I'm a regular midweek poster or can identify increased usage close to some major life event.

Good stuff though!!

NMH: Sports Infovizing

2006-01-11T22:47:00-05:00

Paraphrasing Barry Wellman, "The only people measured more than academics are ball players." I wonder if sports data has ever hit the information visualization community?

This line of thought was motivated through getting stuck in my office working on some research papers over the weekend. National Football League playoffs started on Saturday, and I have a rooting interest in the Washington, D. C. franchise who played that day. I didn't have a radio, and really couldn't afford -- the time or the money -- to subscribe to the online game video. So I pulled up the real time game tracker at CBS SportsLine. It worked great. Not only do score updates get pushed to the browser, but a complete log of every play is recorded, numerous stats compiled, and realtime running commentary from a stringer is provided. Yowsa!!

A realtime viz of all the data generated would be interesting, but it also appears that the URL structure for the entire season is relatively easy to understand. A crawler to grab the entire season's pages could be knocked off in a day or two, and you could have a nice data set of real world data to try and visualize. Of course availability on the Web means the raw data is somewhere to be had, but I'm sure someone (read NFL) will charge you an arm and a leg for it.

Why would anybody want to do this? Major PR and commercial possibilities aside, the pool of folks who would want to participate in rigorous experiments would be pretty good. Plus, you could try out expert vs novice style designs, with a relative plethora of, self-identified ;-), subject matter experts available. And ala Martin Wattenberg's experience with the Baby Name Voyager (PDF), I could see hordes of Monday Morning Quarterback's socially working their way through complex data analysis.

By the by, the Wattenberg paper is a quick, good read.

Gonze: WebJay Bought

2006-01-09T23:34:00-05:00

WebJay, the social media playlist site, has been bought by Yahoo!. I'm mainly an observant bystander, although I do have a languishing Y! Unlimited subscription, but Lucas Gonze seems like a guy who deserves to hit it big. Tristan Louis seems to have an early, post announcement interview with Gonze.

Then again Hawaii to Santa Monica might seem like punishment to some folks.

[Via O'Reilly Radar and Kevin Burton]

Carmo: PSP Notes

2006-01-08T21:51:00-05:00

Link parkin': Rui Carmo's notes on his PlayStation Portable. He's right, Lumines is crack.

Bergman: Google Video Store

2006-01-06T22:59:00-05:00

Yeah, you can get news of the Google Video announcement from a horde of the usual suspects, but one photo by Cory Bergman crystallized why this is right in Google's wheelhouse. Keep in mind that I translate the Google philosophy of "organize the world's data", into "work on fscking hard data wrangling problems, at global scale."

There's a little mention by Bergman about breaking up videos into scenes. I don't know the state of video shot detection research, but I have to guess it's not ridiculously easy on "any old video". Hard problem 1.

Now that you've got the shots selected, and any other metadata you might have at hand, build up a good queryable index. Make it easy enough for television people to use. (I kid!) Hard problem 2.

Did I mention store all those videos and make them easily accessible anywhere on the net? While video has become more friendly with the Web, it still doesn't exactly play well. Partially because the files are huge and partially because of the bandwidth needed, both issues which are being eroded by Moore's law. But not at a pace to make dealing with video at a global scale easy. Ask Akamai. Hard problem 3.

I could see Larry and Sergey rounding up a bunch of those systems PhDs along with a few top web UI folks and saying, "We need to build a platform for the world's biggest video content management system. Every file's a couple of gigagbytes, they have practically no metadata, and we can't tolerate any latency delivering the media. What can you guys do?"

"And if it works, we all get rich again, brokering television advertising."

Yup, right up their alley.

Willis & Bowman: NewsVine Overview

2006-01-06T22:36:00-05:00

The Hypergene Media Blog guys have an overview of social news reading site NewsVine, which is still in invitation-only beta. Their take is mostly from a high level, strategic perspective. Brian Benzinger of SolutionWatch, has been using NewsVine for a while, and drills down on the details.

I've never been a huge fan of explicit, vote based, recommendation systems, but there seems to be enough people willing to contribute enough free work to make sites like Slashdot, kuro5hin, Digg and now NewsVine, work. If nothing else, someone needs to call up the folks at ACM SIGCHI and have them set up a workshop on "media voting recommender systems" or somesuch. Maybe there's been some fundamental changes or discoveries since GroupLens that make a difference.

orchard: Shared Feed Reading

2006-01-05T23:38:00-05:00

l.m. orchard just gets to the tip of the iceberg in discussing potential applications of exposing webfeed aggregator internal data. There's lots of fun things that could be done if aggregators made what you're subscribed to and what you've read available in more programmatic fashions. About the best we've got so far is feedroll export, NetNewsWire's AppleScript interface, and a few aggregators that support plugins, mainly for pulling data in.

If you're worried about privacy, the things I'm thinking about don't even require sharing that data with others. However, I think it would be an interesting research project to make sharing possible, and then design some mechanisms to support the construction of social boundaries.

As an aside, a colleague objected to usage of the term "blogroll" to refer to a list of webfeed subscriptions. Blogrolls allegedly referred to the (poorly maintained) lists of sources bloggers posted on the front pages of their blogs. I think I'll just compromise by using feedroll instead. Same connotation, less confusion. Thanks 0xdecafbad!!

NMH: Long Tail == Big Swamp?

2006-01-05T23:20:00-05:00

Just some curmudgeonly thinking, inspired by trying to understand "results" from various "blog search" (and I use that term guardedly), engines. What if that dreamy long tail, the one with the cute, clean little infographic, implying vast commercial potential, is really the equivalent of Florida swampland? A thriving ecosystem indeed, but not exactly human hospitable. Really messy, somewhat shallow, dirty, hard to slog through, easy to get lost in, and chock full of hazardous critters and parasites.

As Greg Linden notes, it's tough work to get the crap out.

Swartz: web.py

2006-01-04T23:51:00-05:00

Speaking of Aaron Swartz, web.py is his horse in the crowded Python Web Application Framework derby. Looks elegant, but no time to kick tires.

Graham, Swartz, Berkun: Spending Time

2006-01-04T23:47:00-05:00

Over the holidays I collected three interesting links regarding time, a.k.a life, expenditure.

Paul Graham takes a high level view of procrastination and how to avoid it, even lauding some forms of putting things off. Aaron Swartz takes a different tack, digging in to the dirty details of procrastination in an effort to be more productive. They both have some good points, but tend towards M.I.T. genius influenced "look for the homerun pitch and swing away".

Scott Berkun zags. Look to passionately make a small difference, let it drive you, and wait for a snowball. At worst you still feel good about what you've done.

The varied philosophies aren't incompatible, but the third seems much more attainable by mere mortals.

NMH: PSP == PARCTAB 3.0?

2006-01-03T23:52:00-05:00

Despite a number of misgivings, Sony's bad media track record and apparent hostility towards independent developers, I asked for and received a PlayStation Portable as a Christmas present. So far I'm pretty hooked on the dang thing, and I only have two games, Madden '06 and Lumines. Not having been invested in video games for the better part of a decade or more, Madden is a long term investment. Jiminy, the amount of game options makes an airplane cockpit look easy. Lumines, a Tetris-style game with a lot of polished chrome, is dirt simple and fills in when I don't want to think hard. I've only had the PSP for about a week, but I'm pretty impressed, despite Sony trying to blow its foot off.

Today I was struck by how much computing and communication power is packed in these portable packages. Check the PSP specs versus the seminal PARCTAB. In about 15 years, we've gained a low cost, mass produced PARCTAB, with a high powered graphics engine and minimum persistent storage of 32 MB, with gigabytes easily available. Plus multiple communications options: IR, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi. My off the cuff estimate is that you've got a factor of 30 speed up on the processor, about two orders of magnitude communications speedup (38.4 kbaud IR vs 10 Mbit/second Wi-Fi), and over 3 orders of magnitude on the storage. With relatively decent development environments available, this would seem to be a cornucopia for ubicomp researchers.

And I haven't even mentioned cellular phones!

People beat Vannevar Bush's "As We May Think" into the ground, but Mark Weiser's "The Computer for the 21st Century" was pretty doggone prophetic too.

Bloglines: That Plumber Guy

2006-01-02T22:09:00-05:00

Bloglines has been having a hard time the past couple of weeks. That plumber guy has been showing up quite often :-(

Maybe he should go to the same masseuse that Flickr visits.

Spolsky: JavaSchools Considered Harmful

2005-12-29T13:37:00-05:00

Speaking of CS curriculum, many folks hold rather inflammatory positions on what should and shouldn't be in the mix, and are quite willing to rant at a moment's notice. I like a good rant as much as the next person. Joel Spolsky bathes in gasoline then promptly applies a blowtorch to himself in arguing that 100% Java based curriculums don't make for good programmers. Heck, they're not even really CS programs. Spectactular!!

N.b. Spolsky is ranting against completely Java based curriculums, not introducing Java as one part of the program.

And for the record, I agree with 95% of what he said. I disagree with the weeding out for weeding out's sake, and not preparing students for PhDs as a means of job security. On the first point, I've met zero faculty who took glee in weeders, although in any degree such courses naturally arise. Second, by the time an undergraduate finishes their degree and completes a PhD, even if straight out of school, you're up for tenure, have tenure, or have moved on. Having potential PhD undergrads work with you, do interesting stuff, and succesfully go on to grad school does more for your job security than making sure they can't do a PhD. What's a good rant without a little hyperbole though?

Besides, I was under the illusion that everyone got an A in 6.001. Didn't seem that hard to me, although my head exploded when Sussman used the last lecture to discuss how to build a Turing complete computer out of cellular automata.

LTU: Two on Intro Programming

2005-12-28T23:48:00-05:00

Lambda the Ultimate had two interesting posts recently related to teaching introductory programming. This interests me because, in the spring quarter, I'll be going into my 6th edition of our second quarter of intro programming, (Jeez, has it been that long). I've never been really happy with the course, partially because it winds up being overconstrained by the courses directly in front of and behind it. Be that as it may I'm always interested in how others approach such courses.

Peter van Roy, posted a bit about his experience introducing programming semantics early in the student's careers. Due to the formal rigor involved this would seem to work at schools with heavier mathematical pre-reqs in their CS programs, which I think is typical of European schools. Good discussion ensues in the comments.

Similarly, a post by Chung-chieh Shen ignites some interesting commentary on the utility of Structure an d Interpretation of Computer Programming, MIT's ur-book on programming. That was my introduction to rigorous thinking about programming and is the textbook we use here in our first course. Bonus, a link to Joseph Bergin, who seems to have done quite a bit of thinking about CS pedagogy.

Kennedy: Google Reader API

2005-12-27T16:29:00-05:00

Niall Kennedy spent some of his holiday time reverse engineering the API behind Google's Webfeed Reader. Apparently, it's a fairly straightforward REST based API that supports easily retrieving and managing subscription blogrolls and unread items. You can also leverage the feed and item tagging that the reader supports.

The big bonus is that Kennedy got the Google Reader team to confirm that they intend to open up the API for independent developers. Timeframe looks like Q1 2006 for something official. Lot's of potential here for interesting new aggregator experiments, especially if blog search was eventually made available, although I realize that last bit is a tricky design and implementation issue.

Dybwad: Performancing

2005-12-26T15:57:00-05:00

Barbara Dybwad's post on the Performancing Firefox extension, provoked me to give it a whirl. Performancing embeds a weblog editing tool directly within Firefox. I'm using it to create this very post.

Performancing isn't going to push me off of MarsEdit on the home Mac. However, it might be an upgrade for me on Windows, where I haven't found a satisfactory weblog editor. It's a little inefficient in terms of screen real estate, and I'm sure there are some glitches under power use, but it has to be better than editing within an HTML form.

NMH: ASIS&T not AIS

2005-12-24T20:58:00-05:00

Minor correction, although the AIS SIGSEMIS Bulletin was interesting, I was actually thinking of The American Society for Information Science & Technology as Avis to ACM's Hertz. While not having nearly as many different activities as ACM, I often seem to run across interesting stuff appearing in the ASIS&T Journal or Annual Conference Proceedings.

Linden: 2006 Predictions

2005-12-23T18:10:00-05:00

Very entertaining predictions from Greg Linden of Findory. Choice ones to my mind are

A "personalization bubble" where VCs dump a ton of money on anyone who can come up with a good personalized search business plan.
Microsoft abandoning Windows Live. That's pretty bold!
Tagging misses the mainstream. Although del.icio.us had more users than Flickr at purchase time.
Wikipedia and the tagging sites face serious spam threats.

Good stuff, although of course everyone's waiting to see Cringely's off the wall predictions.

Frauenfelder: Public Domain Torrents

2005-12-23T17:55:00-05:00

BoingBoing is a craptastic flood of news of the weird and IP/telecom/computing policy. Every now and then a really useful nugget floats by.

Mark Frauenfelder recently pointed out the current top 10 torrents on publicdomaintorrents.com. I didn't realize that stuff like "Night of the Living Dead", and "Plan 9 From Outer Space", are in the public domain. What's the big deal about these films, at least from my perspective? Well, bits and pieces could probably be quite humorously applied to lectures and presentations.

C'mon, you just know there's gotta be a way to use a drop from "Night of the Living Dead" for that lecture on UNIX zombies. ;-)

AIS: SIGSEMIS Bulletin

2005-12-22T22:39:00-05:00

The Association for Information Systems is a group I need to take a closer look at. The organization seems to play Avis to the ACM's Hertz, but I keep running across interesting little papers that appear in proceedings of their conferences or AIS journals.

Witness this recent bulletin (big PDF) from the special interest group on the Semantic Web and Information Systems. I'm not a huge Semantic Web advocate but there's a couple of interesting titles amongst the research papers. Bonus, an interview with Terry Winograd.

Coates: Navigating Excess

2005-12-22T22:11:00-05:00

Just got around to digesting Tom Coates' essay on "Amazon, excess, and the future of navigation...". Sparked by Amazon's recent deployment of, per user, freeform labeling on items, Coates riffs on how to deal with navigation when there are copious objects to deal with. Overall a good piece that captures a rapidly developing trend. I'll just add a couple of cents worth of my own.

Navigation in an environment of excess is a starting point. People want to get things done as they're noodling about on Amazon. While tagging is a good way to socially find new stuff, it's not much help in executing a particular task other than generic browsing. There's a lot of room in web systems for deploying and improving task specific interface mechanisms. As an example, for Amazon making the shopping cart smarter would be a win, but they also have authoring tools in there for making lists, writing reviews, writing guides, and managing registries. How could these new navigation mechanisms make those authoring tools better?

One other thing about dealing with excess. I was just scanning Tufte's "Envisioning Information" again and as usual was jazzed by the sections on Micro/Macro Readings and Small Multiples. Those general ways of thinking seem particularly appropriate for navigating excessive corpuses. Unfortunately, it's really hard to apply these techniques in web based systems. The graphical control needed to pull such visualizations off is well beyond current browsers' capabilities. Also, interaction can provide a major assist here, but even pushing the limits of AJAX and DHTML the best infoviz techniques can't be applied. Maybe this is the appropriate role for Flash and Java applets.

In short, all of these systems that are providing access to huge piles of stuff will force the further development of web-centric interface techniques.

Moffat, Zobel, & Hawking: IR Lit Basics

2005-12-21T22:57:00-05:00

If Recommended Reading for IR Research Students (PDF) is any good, and it probably is, then the paper should be required reading for any one working on blog search.

[Via ResourceShelf]

Intelliseek: Blog Data Release

2005-12-21T22:46:00-05:00

Forgot in passing that Intelliseek has made a largish data dump of blog crawling available. It's about 3 weeks of data from July 2005, covering the London bombing.

Terms of access (PDF) aren't too heinous, other than the "stop using this stuff after the workshop" clause. Sort of puts the screws to using the dataset for any cool demos because as soon as you show off at the workshop and get people hot and bothered about how your system really does scale, you'll be stuck saying, "It's really cool on the Intelliseek data set, but all I can show you now are screen shots," for the rest of WWW2006. Bummer.

NMH: Technorati Claiming

2005-12-21T01:53:00-05:00

Ignore the man behind the mirror. I'm just trying to claim this blog on Technorati.

Heck, this might wind up being the first post here I actually delete.

NMH: The WebBeat

2005-12-20T23:42:00-05:00

In the thinking out loud department, what would happen if a traditional news organization went balls out with a snarky, online, WebBeat edition. The sole focus would be to have blanket coverage of the intersection of a metro area, its citizens and the Web. This was partially inspired by Chicago's RedStreak giving up the ghost.

Of course you're saying, but I've already got Chicagoist, Gapers Block, Change of Subject, etc. etc. Those sites provide general coverage of Chicago, not a particular focus on what Chicagoans are doing on the Web or how the Web is impacting Chicago. The WebBeat would be one level up, getting behind the scenes of things on the Web people routinely rely upon or should know about. Also, when I say balls out, I mean cranking out regular posts 24/7, tossing in routine lengthy features, pushing the envelope on media distribution (podcasting/vlogging) and maybe supporting some discussion but with really heavy gardening.

Why do this?

One, using the Web is simply becoming more a part of urban life every day. If the Mayor's office is going to conduct more and more business online, why isn't someone covering local government from a Web angle? If I'm in Outer Baluchistan and I need a Bears fix, what are the best online options for streaming video, streaming audio, and commentary? What are the secret gems buried in the web sites of the Field Museum and the Art Institute? Give me profiles of hot young Internet companies based in Chicago.
Two, as opposed to trying to do citizen's journalism, it plays to old media's strengths, reporting, writing and production, but still can connect more closely with readers.
Three, this might be something young readers come to find indispensable. Maybe advertisers too.
Four, you can probably do it fairly cheap. Find a young, cheap Adrian Holovaty type to build out the site and interface with subcontracted designers, pair with one dedicated recent j-school grad to wrangle cats and write features, and get a lot of small contributions from the rest of the newsroom. Not to mention all the material you'd get just from keeping a good eye on local folks publishing online themselves.

Seriously, it can't be any worse than RedEye Online. And if you're a conglomerate, wash, rinse, repeat for each of your markets. This isn't going to save the company, but it could be a nice next step after the newsroom figures out that blogging won't bring down a lightning strike.

Alexa: Web Search Platform

2005-12-19T23:59:00-05:00

Alexa's opening up of its Web Search Platform is an interesting gambit, but unlike John Battelle's thinking, I'm not sure it's a game changer. At the very least, the jury has yet to be impaneled, much less still out.

Browsing the the Alexa Web Search User Guide, there's lots of serious support for distributed/parallel programming in there. Unfortunately, there's a good bit to learn and a small number of people in the world who are really equipped to make even decent use of it, especially since your mistakes actually cost real money. Real distributed/parallel programming at these scales is dang hard!

Also, a major impediment is a reliance on Alexa's web crawler, whose operation is opaque as far as I can tell. Innovators are thus at the whim of whatever the crawler brings back. Maybe a first set of projects to be commissioned on the Alexa indices and repositories is an empirical study of what's actually in them. For example, it might be sort of irritating in some circles if the crawler doesn't attempt to crawl URLs ending in .php. This is not an unreasonable limitation for a planetary scale web crawler. And if you think there's even a large (> 20%) portion of the Web's content in there you're delusional.

On the other hand, the project is a highly visible rent-a-grid project with access to some major non-scientific datasets. The platform is probably a bit of a boon to information retrieval and web search researchers, especially those who can't round up the grant money for their own grid clusters, or pinch some colleagues for access. Not to mention the system administration has been outsourced.

One other minor nuisance, I suspect there'll be some hair in a platform application that starts redistributing material from the crawls wholesale. I'm pretty sure this is a copyright violation and if you draw the gaze of the wrong folks, lets just say you better have some good lawyers.

MIT UID: Chickenfoot

2005-12-17T11:25:00-05:00

Greasemonkey is a great tool for extending your browser...if you're a hardcore programmer. Chickenfoot is an alternative end-user programming environment, embedded in Firefox, developed by Michael Bolin, Robert Miller, and crew of M.I.T's User Interface Design Group. The major wins of Chickenfoot are a focus on naive programmers, an interactive development environment, and a high level representation of the rendered Web page as the major object of manipulation.

[Via Lambda the Ultimate]

rue + Pike: SessionSaver

2005-12-16T23:31:00-05:00

SessionSaver is a lifesaver. It's a Firefox extension that saves your windows and tabs across shutdowns and even crashes. I've been using it for about a month now, and it's cut my cursing at the computer by 50% Here's hoping it makes someone else's life a little bit better.

Really!!

Reas, Fry, & friends: Processing Marches On

2005-12-16T23:27:00-05:00

I don't actually use processing, but admire how the environment and community keep on trucking. The changes for the latest release, 0098 indicates more robustness, and even a save to application function. Previously processing projects were delivered as applets, which can often be a less than compelling experience. Just try getting a browser to reload a jar file if you need to publish fixes!!

Anyhoo, I think processing can be declared a positive case study on how a domain specific language, with a solid dose of evangelism, can make computing attractive to folks not normally inclined to it. Good enough to get you on the cover of Nature and in the Whitney is good enough for me.

Livnat, et. al.: VisAware

2005-12-16T23:14:00-05:00

VisAware (PDF link) is the generalization of a visualization technique for situational awareness, developed by Yarden Livnat, Jim Agutter, Shaun Moon and Stefano Foresti, all of the University of Utah. I'll attempt a bad capsule summary. A spatial map is ringed with concentric circles. The circles capture time and type of event occurrences. Lines connect urgent events with locations on the map. Connect with color and interactivity and you get an effective display for keeping on top of a large number of events without an a priori obvious way to correlate them, but three potential correlation vectors: time, type and location. While the screen captures are exceedingly seductive, the paper describes the rigorous construction of a formal framework for generating them.

The authors aren't particularly clear on what this technique isn't good for, but an extrapolation to webfeed aggregation is probably worth a prototype. Take a relatively large blogroll and use some clustering techniques to generate a two dimensional map between them. Then blog posts become the events, which conveniently have a time element, and can point back to feeds to which they're related. Event typing could be hardwired to some levels of "importance", or user controlled, e.g. the result of standing searches against aggregated items.

[Via infosthetics]

McGuire & Slater: Future of Playlists

2005-12-15T23:51:00-05:00

Just read an intriguing market study from Mike McGuire and Derek Slater predicting that by 2010, 25% of legal music purchases will be driven by taste sharing mechanisms, including (especially?) playlist sharing. The report was jointly commissioned through Harvard's Berkman Center and Gartner, so it trends towards the business/marketing end of things, but assuming the survey methodology is sound, points at the potential for another Web native form to emerge.

There's money to be made in them there playlists!

Of course Webjay's Lucas Gonze has been pushing, to good effect, on sharing of playlists that point to free streams. The McGuire and Slater paper documents a number of music file and playlist sharing mechanisms within commercial efforts like iTunes (iMix), Rhapsody (Playlist Central), MusicStrands, Mercora, etc. etc. I want to be skeptical of the potential since making playlists is work. However, there's enough evidence that enough people are motivated to do this that it could take off, if it hasn't already and I just don't know it.

The tricky bit is how to write transmittable, but rights safe, playlists. If a playlist points to licensed music, and I send the playlist to someone who doesn't have the same license, what happens? I was perusing the XSPF format and this appears to me to be fraught with a few technical issues: canonically identifying tracks, resolving how to retrieve them, yadda yadda.

But the DJ in me has a fascination with the potential for playlists as another social media.

FeedBurner: FeedFlare

2005-12-14T14:54:00-05:00

FeedBurner is pushing the envelope in terms of making individual feed items useful with their new product FeedFlare. Since FeedBurner proxys feeds for publishers, they can easily add elements to a feed item such as related links (according to Technorati) or tags from del.icio.us. I wonder how far this can be pushed, because while a feed item is generally rendered as HTML, aggregators aren't quite the same as web browsers.

One downside though is that aggregators need to be able to remove the FeedFlare stuff before doing duplicate detection. Seems like Bloglines isn't doing this and let's just say the results are a bit irritating. More work for aggregator writers if this becomes popular.

Smalley: On Jon Kleinberg

2005-12-14T00:01:00-05:00

Eric Smalley's Technology Research News interview with Jon Kleinberg summarizes why Kleinberg is such a genius.

Willis & Bowman: Usable Exhaust

2005-12-13T23:21:00-05:00

A love the term usable exhaust which I ran across at Hypergene MediaBlog. The phrase captures the essence of the more academic, social navigation, in an accessible fashion with a dash of potential activity thrown in.

The subsequent analysis is a bit lacking though.

First off, Chris Willis and/or Shayne Bowman correctly point out that tagging isn't magic pixie dust, but as implemented tagging is extremely important as usable exhaust. In both del.icio.us and Flickr each tag emits an RSS feed, which makes it easy to monitor a topic's exhaust. Even better, in both systems you can watch a given person's tag, so you can actually focus on people (also groups in Flickr) that you care about. Plus, you can discover new tags through the feeds as well. The del.icio.us popular page is probably a bad example as it often includes stale links and for many del.icio.us users the popular URLs aren't all that useful.

Also, the veneration of APIs is undeserved. In both systems, the number of applications that use the API, introduce users to each other, and make it easy to find new, interesting content is vanishingly small. Of those I bet they are used by a relatively small minority of the community. Heck, about the only thing the del.icio.us API is really good for is backing up your bookmarks, since you can only see your own and can't get any global information.

I could be convinced that the Butt-Brush factor is a real issue, but I'd counter with the amazing number of ways social connections can be made in Flickr if you choose to be public: groups, group photo pools, comments in groups, comments on photos, favorites, interestingness, contacts. Also, on every photo the tags, sets, and pools it participates in are visible and navigable, so the more exhaust you generate the more you grease the skids for other people to get sucked into Flickr. Finally, there's a white hot core of community on Flickr that probably generates the most traffic through socializing and providing the best content. Luckily Joe Just Get Photos Online can ease in with little hassle, but he makes up the weak periphery.

The authors are right that RSS is easily overlooked. They did it themselves. Again, RSS isn't just an add-on, it's an essential mechanism by which people can monitor the activities of others. It's how people see your exhaust!

Other than that, great post!

Riedl & Dourish: TOCHI on Recommenders

2005-12-12T23:56:00-05:00

Link parkin': A little late to the party, but the September 2005 issue of ACM Transactions on CHI, edited by John Riedl and Paul Dourish looks to have some interesting papers on recommender systems and social navigation.

Nothing like a little light reading over the holidays!!

BlogMedia: Blog Network List

2005-12-12T23:48:00-05:00

Now we've got rankings of blog networks. Given a relentless focus on advertising, where size does matter, will the commercial blogosphere eventually congeal into an oligarchy of of massive corporate concerns? Meet the new boss, same as the old one!!

Anyhoo, as these efforts to analyze largish (between 100s and 10s of thousands) sets of weblogs proliferate, I wonder if we'll start to see some open source tools for experimentation and independent verification. I'm not an open source zealot, but for independent researchers, it's hard to trust results based on closed systems. Maybe this year's Weblog Ecosystem Workshop will provide something in this area.

Hedlund: Aardvark'd Review

2005-12-10T18:25:00-05:00

Tough crowd. Marc Hedlund, and commenters, aren't too positive on Aardvark'd, the film documentary of Fog Creek Software's, and by extension Joel Spolsky's, summer interns. Sounds like there's not a lot of Joel and not enough SW development, which is what many people were expecting.

I had some high hopes for it as promotional material for aspiring CS majors. I'll reserve commentary, but it still might be entertaining and useful to those who come to it without familiarity with Joel and his oeurve.

Apropos of Elle Driver: "You know I've always liked that word... oeuvre.. so rarely get to use it in a sentence."

Y!: Owns del.icio.us

2005-12-09T15:14:00-05:00

That was fast. Yahoo! bought del.icio.us. Here's Joshua Schachter's announcement

Predicted consequences:

Lookout for the Y! single sign-on and hail of stories regarding disgruntled users leaving
Ads on del.icio.us
Reduced downtime
The long promised rollout of group/privacy features
One more entry on the Y! toolbar

One thing that would be really entertaining is some integration with Yahoo!'s media offerings. Imagine Y! Music Engine with a good bookmarking service inside.

NMH: Laptopless

2005-12-08T21:38:00-05:00

Just a minor followup on my next laptop given the the dead Thinkpad, because I know you were waiting with baited breath on the decision.

I've decided to go laptopless for a while. I'm something of a quiet contrarian which motivates the decision. Once upon a time, I'd be one of a small handfull of folks who'd pull into the cafe and crank away at getting stuff done. Now you've got gaggles of teenyboppers copping all the good tablespace, not to mention outlets, with 5 laptops for 3 people. I kid you not. Time to move away from the herd a bit so I can regain that smug feeling of superiority.

Also, I've been laptop primary for close to 5 years now, and a lot has changed for desktops in that timeframe. Heck, mongo flat panel LCDs are cheap now!!

Lastly, I really want to get back to MacOS for the next laptop and figure I'll slice a few fingertips off as a frontline adopter when the Intel based PowerBooks come out.

Oh and no smilies for the humor impaired.

Godin, et. al.: Squidoo

2005-12-08T21:14:00-05:00

Marketing wiz Seth Godin and a few friends have launched Squidoo, a site for "lensmasters". As best I can tell, Squidoo combines a number of well polished Web authoring techniques into a nice package that allows people to easily develop lenses, a.k.a. rubrics or precis, on specific topics. Toss in LensRank, a ranking mechanism of unknown origin at least to those of us not enrolled in Squidu, a clear focus on what people are supposed to do, along with the potential for lensmasters to receive AdSense revenue, and you've got an evolutionary step in web authoring past blogging.

For those who've got a lot to say, or bleeding edge types, they're probably better off just doing a good job maintaining a focused weblog+wiki combo. But for time constrained people who just want to cash in on their expertise Squidoo might be the way to go. I'm interested to see the "hundreds upon hundres of modules" advertised in the FAQ. Why the need for so many lens building blocks and how does a small company build so many?

NMH: Dead Thinkpad

2005-12-07T19:08:00-05:00

Apropos of nothing, I'm not sure it's a good or bad sign that when my post-warranty, unbacked-up Thinkpad T41 (nice machine) flat croaked with only 48 hours of flakiniess, I had no serious thoughts of going ballistic on Lenovo, nee IBM.

I said a prayer for the harddrive's survival. I got out the tools, and extracted said harddrive. I put the harddrive in a $50 IDE to USB enclosure, picked up at a nearby Best Buy, and plugged the dang thing into my desktop. Didn't lose a bit of data.

The Thinkpad HW? The LCD, Centrino Chip, 768 MB SDRAM, Keyboard, Trackpad, Wi-Fi Chip, XGA adapter, CD-RW, 100 MB Etherenet chip, et. al.? Ain't nothin but dirt to me baby. I figure it'll make a nice doorstop, or gag machine. Oh my god, I dropped my laptop just before the presentation.

And there might be a little value in the DRAM, but other than that...

Here endeth the catharsis.

Lee: PageRank Syllabus

2005-12-07T19:01:00-05:00

Link parkin: Ho John Lee's short list of social ranking technical papers, including a deep, comprehensive look at PageRank by Langville and Meyer

Gonze: Lightnets

2005-12-07T18:52:00-05:00

I'm enjoying Lucas Gonze's intellectual development of the lightnet concept. To summarize, lightnets are Weblike (based?) networks for the distribution, linking, and editing of open continuous media, e.g. video and audio. Gonze has more technical definition, a strawman, and some examples of what contributes to lightnets and darknets.

A key emphasis is on "open" in both the media and tools. There are plenty of challenges here, especially in the face of massive, deep pocket, incumbents who already have a stranglehold on much of our culture. But this is a commons worth championing.

Then again, as Jon Udell finds out in his continuing tilts against the windmill, technical issues with making video and audio of the web are not to be ignored either.

Yahoo!: The SearchLine

2005-12-06T21:26:00-05:00

Somewhat stale, but a recent post on the official Yahoo! Blog points out that there are over 30 search shortcuts you can use on the site. I don't know how or if they combine well with advanced search, but that's a mini-programming language.

Ob. geek. Clearly it's not Turing complete and probably not formally develped but therein lies a challenge for an enterprising domain specific language builder. Develop a tiny, accessible, extensible language for expressing search queries. Majority of language power has to available from one-liners of less than 40 characters or so.

Holovaty: Congressional Vote DB

2005-12-05T22:36:00-05:00

The first visible fruits of Adrian Holovaty doing his thing for The Washington Post have appeared. Working with Derek Willis, Adrian used Django to build an interactive database of congressional votes, House and Senate, going back to 1991. Over and above general availability, the site also lets you monitor your congress critt, errr, representatives, using RSS feeds. Brilliant!!

Crafty news organizations will increasingly see a big part of their business as developing high local profile (of course this is US national, but it's beneath Google/Yahoo!/MS scale) software sites and services for the public good. Given the continuing importance of online advertising, such efforts are one way to differentiate from the usual ad network suspects.

Oh, and wash, rinse, repeat, for any public records database, which newspapers have a wealth of experience digging into. Speaking of which, Adrian's old boss Rob Curley, pulled off a similar feat when he was running online in Topeka, if I remember correctly.

O'Reilly: ETech 2006 Reg $$!!

2005-12-05T17:41:00-05:00

I haven't visited the Left Coast in a while, and was searching for some good motivation. ETech 2006 seems nerdly and influential enough that it might be worth a peek. Earlier in the fall I was digging around looking around for previous prices on O'Reilly's Emerging Technology Conference, but was having a hard time finding any mention on the web. Now I know why. Sticker shock.

I still may see if I can scrape something together.

Lund, et. al.: Connotea Case Study

2005-12-05T17:38:00-05:00

D-Lib magazine recently published two articles on social bookmarking services. One was a general overview of the current landscape, the second was an indepth look at Connotea. These are handy citations for lending authenticity to your next peer reviewed paper describing some whizzy new social bookmarking research.

Combine with Golder and Huberman's paper and there's the nascent kernel of a rigorous research community.

NMH: Bloglines Complaint

2005-12-05T17:31:00-05:00

Maybe it's because I visit bloglines from a multiplicity of machines, but I seem to be getting repeat items quite often. Highly irritating. I'm just about ready to punt the service. Not to mention that Bloglines is a tad insecure.

Keller: Improving Tagging

2005-12-03T23:14:00-05:00

Phillip Keller asks whether the tagging revolution is stuck, and while rambling through a number of tagging features, posits some ways tagging systems can be improved.

Generally, I'm not a big fan of tagging as categorization. As implemented, one of the best things del.icio.us does is support social navigation, which Keller notes in passing. However, the tail end of his commentary hits on some juicy territory. Most of the tagging systems are pretty poor at creating other things out of a pile of tagged items. Keller's example is creating simple ordered lists. I'll one up it and say a meta-application of del.icio.us would be the ability to create hierarchical outlines by choosing from sets of tagged items. Such an app would be good for doing things like reading lists, wish lists, and playlists.

processing users: infoviz refs

2005-12-02T17:04:00-05:00

Link parkin': the processing discussion board births a discussion that generates a number of good links to information visualization readings.

Bellard: QEMU

2005-12-02T16:33:00-05:00

Link parkin': Fabrice Bellard's QEMU project provides an open source solution to virtual machine emulation on Win32. Interestingly, unlike Microsoft Virtual PC and VMWare, QEMU can emulate other processors, e.g. PowerPC, ARM, on an x86 machine, if I read the status page correctly.

Academia: Workshop CFPs

2005-12-01T23:41:00-05:00

Finally, something worth writing about. Three weblog relevant workshop calls for papers came across the transom.

First off, at WWW 2006, the International Workshop in the Weblogging Ecosystem, makes its third appearance. This time Intelliseek is providing a large pile o' data for people to munge as they see fit.

As an added attraction for WWW 2006, there's now a Workshop on Collaborative Tagging. Out of this CFP comes interesting notes on folks I sort of know. Looks like Soctt Golder has taken time off from (ditched?) The Media Lab and is now working at HP Labs. The tagging paper he wrote with Bernardo Huberman is good stuff and I'm glad to see it get published somewhere. Also, Andrew Tomkins, of Web Fountain fame, has definitely ditched IBM and is now working for Yahoo! Research. Very interesting.

Lastly, Fernanda Viegas and Karrie Karahalios are organizing a CHI 2006 workshop on Social Visualization. Not only will the workshop address visualization of textual social media, e.g. blogs, e-mail, but will be looking at video and audio as well.

Time to get back to work!!

API: Newspaper Next

2005-11-16T23:47:00-05:00

A few folks are slagging the roster of experts behind the American Press Institute's Newspaper Next effort, but there's a couple of energetic and interesting names in there. Skrenta and Wyman are definitely outsiders, while Curley, Yelvington, and Youngman have been up to interesting things from within a traditional newspaper framework.

Personally, I'm starting to find the revolutionary rhetoric a bit shrill. Newspapers and news orgs are too big to up and disappear/transform overnight. It'll be a slow morph ala the US auto industry, a.k.a. not world dominant but still a major factor in a new form.

NPG: Open Source Connotea

2005-11-16T23:36:00-05:00

Link parkin': I didn't realize that the Nature Publishing Group provided Connotea under the GPL. Connotea is a Web based, scientific article, bookmark manager with tagging include.

boyd: Collected Papers

2005-11-13T18:13:00-05:00

Speaking of boyd, if you're interested in sociable media and software spaces, you'll want to grovel over her writings, especially if you're an ubergeek and think it's all about the software.

heer: Prefuse Papers

2005-11-13T18:10:00-05:00

I've talked about Jeffrey Heer's, prefuse toolkit. Written in Java, prefuse supports various interesting information visualization techniques and is particularly good at animation. For example, Heer and danah boyd conspired to implement visualization and navigation of Friendster.

Heer, Card, and Landay have a paper in CHI 2005 that describes the toolkit from a research perspective. Meanwhile, Heer's MS report digs into the internals of prefuse a bit more. Interestingly the toolkit is actually fairly simple in design concepts and should be easily portable to other GUI toolkits. For example, building a prefuse like toolkit in Python+wxWindows should be straightforward, given the paper and the prefuse source code. This would be worthwhile to get a hold of some benefits of Python relative to Java.

NMH: Happiness is...

2005-11-10T23:55:00-05:00

a new Lithium-Ion battery for my laptop, which can hold it's charge for more than 45 - 60 minutes.

Willison: Y! Maps Summary

2005-11-10T23:34:00-05:00

Link parkin': A good overview of the new Yahoo! Maps APIs for busy developers, by Simon Willison.

Anjewierden: Open Blog Data

2005-11-10T23:28:00-05:00

Are you a weblog researcher looking for clean data to analyze? Ask and ye shall receive.

Cohen: PubSub Community Lists

2005-11-10T23:10:00-05:00

Steven Cohen is the Library List editor for PubSub which currently has a total of four Community Lists. A community list is essentially a blogroll, but augmented with some analysis provided by PubSub's LinkRanks tool. The analysis gives you a sense of the activity of the feeds in a list of sources. Also, I'm assuming the lists are easily turned into PubSub queries which generate an aggregate headline feed. With PubSub though, you could also get a meta-feed of posts that point to posts captured by the blogroll.

Some observations and thoughts. Since the analyses are dynamic, it would be powerful if they could be delivered as RSS. Similar mechanisms should be baked into webfeed aggregators. You could cobble something like this out of PubSub queries if there was a decent interface for managing and editing them.

I was about to blame this on PubSub's use of XMPP and lack of a Web services API, but there is no such lack. Apparently, I missed out on the PubSub REST API announcement. Conveniently this API deals with subscription management into PubSub and HTTP based distribution of announcements from PubSub. Wrapping all of this in a nice Web interface is just a small matter of programming.

Via Tara Calishain's Research Buzz

NMH: Intro. Prog. + Comp. Nets

2005-11-09T17:43:00-05:00

Just a couple of half baked thoughts, inspired by the discovery of io and recent social network hacking. First, implementing a library for graph representation and large scale, complex network experimentation, think networkx for Python, would make a good benchmark application for learning a new language. Such a library engages concepts that should be easy to understand, is easy to map on common datatypes, enables a bunch of fun algorithms and can exercise interactive facilities like GUI toolkits. Add in the large scale aspect, e.g. implementing a set of important social network analysis algorithms/processes on 100,000 node graphs, and you'd get a decent non-numeric performance benchmark.

Congruent to that, I wonder how interesting a whole intro curriculum that exclusively used complex networks for motivating examples could be? Again, I think the science of complex networks could be made quite accesible, yet programming simulations of such networks or derivative applications could easily cover all of a CS1 curriculum.

It'd be a hoot for the students to keep progressing in a CS degree and saying, "Hey, didn't we talk about that in Intro. Programming!" And who doesn't want to know why Kevin Bacon is (not) the center of the acting universe.

Jain: flickrfs

2005-11-09T17:31:00-05:00

Linux's user extensible file system architecture is the gift that keeps on giving. Manish Rai Jain has hacked up a Linux filesystem interface to the Flickr API. Now you can grovel over the contents of Flickr using the same old scripting techniques you have for plain old text files.

Dekorte: Io

2005-11-09T17:26:00-05:00

Other than answering the question "why?", Steve Dekorte's io programming language looks like a lot of fun. A radically simple mixture of Smalltalk, Self, Actor, and Lisp concepts, the cute bits are that the implementation plays really well with C, meaning io is easy to embed in other programs and easy to develop bindings to C libraries for. Out of the box looks like you can get a lot done. OOPSLA paper and slides for more details.

Could be useful as a pedagogical tool. A relatively pure OOP language would be interesting to explore in a PLDI class.

Burton: TailRank Public Beta

2005-11-08T19:30:00-05:00

Kevin Burton's latest baby joins Flock as a "industry term who's name will not be spoken" application that decloaks. TailRank is now in public beta, meaning you don't need a personal invitation to start using his new Web based aggregation tool.

Let's hope Burton's release goes a little smoother than Flock's did.

NMH: Wanted, Aggregation + Foraging

2005-11-07T22:17:00-05:00

After looking at the pile of "marked as new" articles I have in Bloglines, I realized most aggregators are pretty poor at helping me forage, pull the meaty bits out of, the information they collect. Adding tagging is a start, but get the dang things out of my, at least that's the problem with Bloglines. Don't get me started on the laboriousness of "clips" in Bloglines.

NetNewsWire is a bit nicer in that it'll pile marked articles in a special folder, but it's still only one pile. And while I know I can drive NetNewsWire through AppleScript to act on items in that pile, action in aggregators is still a second class citizen.

NSF: Creativity Support Tools

2005-11-07T22:06:00-05:00

One aspect of NSF that gets underpromoted is the funding of small workshops where experts get together and chart new territories. Noodling around the University of Maryland HCIL site, I ran across the results of the Workshop on Creativity Support Tools.

Led by Ben Schneiderman and Gerhard Fischer, the workshop roster is pretty impressive, including folks like Richard Florida, Peter Freeman, Brad Meyers, Randy Pausch, John Maeda, and Mary Czerwinski, just to name a few. Definitely something to sink the teeth into.

Spolsky: Aardvark'd, The DVD!

2005-11-07T21:55:00-05:00

Joel Spolsky takes relentless self-promotion to new levels. In a good way. Who else could turn the excitement of summer geek internships into a documentary with a modicum of Hollywood production values.

Actually, this could be worthy of most CS departments in the country buying a copy to give their students a better look at what real SW development looks like. Seems like a no brainer for any course with Project and Management in the title.

Skrenta: Topix Tagging Blogs

2005-11-07T21:48:00-05:00

Thanks to some travel I'm a little late to the party, but I was tipped off by Topix.net CEO Rich Skrenta (entrepreneur, NU alum) that, Topix has added blogs to its news mix. Topix automatically tags/categorizes content coming out of continuously updated sources like news feeds and provides search against those labeled chunks.

One of the interesting things about Skrenta's post is his analysis of how much crap there is out there in the blogosphere. To summarize, 90% crap approaching 95% useless, e.g. not frequently updated.

Let's see if I'm in the Topix index.

Anjewierden: Weblog Mapping

2005-10-23T17:41:00-04:00

Link parkin': Anjo Ajewierden discusses the details of mapping a community of webloggers. For future empirical weblog investigators, his list of weblogs crawled could serve as a reference set to compare against.

Wonder if you can get the raw data set?

Champ: Flickring LAMPs

2005-10-21T23:29:00-04:00

Nicely played Heather Champ. NMH appreciates a good play on words.

And any information on large, scale LAMP implementations is always welcome.

Newman: BCSRank

2005-10-20T20:53:00-04:00

This is just for grins. Mark Newman has cooked up a network based, ranking algorithm for college football teams, with all the mathematical rigor you might expect of a world class physicist.

I wonder how well it predicts future performance given past results?

NMH: An Ode to BSDDB

2005-10-20T20:39:00-04:00

I've noted here and seen elsewhere usage of Sleepycat's implementation of Berkeley DB for persistent storage. I've started really pushing on an application that uses it as well, and I have to see it's a really handy tool.

The C level library builds easily on both Win32 and UNIX
Amazingly, the Java wrappers build just as easily on both platforms
Since BerkeleyDB uses plain old files, it's easy to back up and restore your database.
For the standard Python implementation, there's a wonderful module that wraps the library and makes it easy to store most Python objects straightforwardly.
With a little bit of work, I've got Jython using the same DB files unchanged, and pulling out Python objects written by the CPython implementation.
The basic API ignores concurrency, but if you need it you can make DBs sharable between threads and across process address spaces.
Transactions. Nuff said.
Exceedingly well documented

Basically I'm slogging around multi-megabyte persistent stores and accessing them in two different languages on two different platforms. Painlessly. Many current hackers knee jerk reaction to any kind of querying/persistent storage requirement is to automatically pull out MySQL. If you have relatively well understood, not too complex queries you're probably better off using Berkeley DBs.

Weinberger: Digital Bicycle

2005-10-20T00:01:00-04:00

I'm on the board of directors for a scrappy little, youth technology/media arts organization called Street Level Youth Media. Today was the annual benefit, a very fine affair that also reminded me that a lot of the board has turned over recently and after 10 years the organization is looking to a new chapter. Street Level is interesting in that it's one of the few places in Chicago where underserved young people can get a healthy dose of video and audio production training.

Which reminded me of David Weinberger's post about Digital Bicycle. In essence, Digital Bicycle is about building peer-to-peer technologies for grass roots media organizations to distribute their works. And since the software is going to be open source, looks perfect for the thrifty non-profit organization. Sounds right up Street Level's alley.

Vinson: Aggregator Demands

2005-10-18T22:14:00-04:00

I'm pretty sure that like me, Jack Vinson uses his aggregator as a knowlege foraging tool, but he's way more demanding than I am. Check out his list of features in an ideal feed aggregator. Then again he earns his bread in knowledge management.

One interesting theme that has been lost through the marginalization of Radio Userland is that space of features oriented around writing from your aggregator. NetNewsWire + MarsEdit is pretty good at this, although the coupling doesn't strike me as tight. I don't know of any other desktop aggregators that attempt this, although I confess I haven't been kicking tires recently.

The low end of aggregators has been commoditized by Yahoo!, MS, Google, et.al., but there's plenty of room for innovation and niche action.

Veen: Measure Map

2005-10-18T22:08:00-04:00

Recently I wondered where the intro/retrospection tools for weblogs were. Jeffrey Veen of Adaptive Path recently sneak peeked Measure Map. Measure Map looks more like a higher level Web statistics package, but at least it advances the agenda.

I'll be interested to see how it actually focuses on blogs. Does it just look at log files, with some special information about the blog? Or does Measure Map watch RSS and comment feeds, then selectively interrogate log data?

Via Barb Dybwad @ The Social Software Weblog

Palmer: Vienna 2

2005-10-17T23:24:00-04:00

Steve Palmer seems to be the leader/lead developer for Vienna 2, an open source RSS aggregator, for OS X, with the spit and polish of NetNewsWire. Given MacOS's inherent scriptability, this could be a good platform to work on exploring a hyper-extensible desktop aggregator. Hey, Brent Simmons is a great guy, and there are other extensible aggregators out there, read Awasu, but occassionally you just don't want to wait for the main developers.

NMH: Pardon the Disruption

2005-10-17T23:09:00-04:00

It doesn't come through here that often but I'm a closet sports junkie, and well the last 72 hours have been a bit eventful.

I mean the NHL is back, and you gotta get with that NBA preseason!!

Just kidding. But

4 complete games with the money on the table? Sick!
Notre Dame vs USC? Best college football game, EVAH!!
Just for Angels fans, A.J. Pierzinsky
Albert Pujols is a bad, bad man. "I mean anything travels that far oughta have a damn stewardess on it, don't you think?"
Oh yeah, that World Series thing is coming to Chicago.

Lima: visualcomplexity.com

2005-10-13T19:47:00-04:00

Yowsa! Manuel Lima, creator of Blogviz, is collecting various complex network visualization projects at: VisualCompelxity.com. There's already over 150 entries, many with quite stunning thumbnail screen captures.

Mozilla.org: Firefox 1.5 Beta

2005-10-12T22:38:00-04:00

I may just be hallucinating, but Firefox 1.5 Beta seems a heck of a lot faster. Hopefully they put the dang browser on a memory diet. We'll see if it falls apart under my typical onslaught of open tabs.

Meanwhile, Simon Willison neatly summarizes some of the interesting functionality changes upcoming.

Benzinger: DIU Vizzing

2005-10-12T21:35:00-04:00

Brian Benzinger, at Solution Watch, collected links to a number of tools which visualize del.icio.us behavior, either for an individual or globally. Handy to have them all in one place.

Vande Moere: CNET goes NetViz

2005-10-10T19:43:00-04:00

infosthetics recently pointed out that CNet has strarted putting up network visualizations of its story space. Looks like the viz is built off of the affiliation network of terms and stories.

Now there's a network infoviz researcher's wet dreams of data. I'd put my money on a) most users not using the feature, and b) of those that do, a high percentage getting confused and only using it a couple of times. But I'm just the cranky contrarian. However, CNet has a big enough dataset of information and users to draw some real conclusions, with some rigorous analysis.

Here's a feature I'd kill for in these visualizations. They give zero help in maintaining trails through the information landscape. At least provide a shopping cart, fancy it up however you need to for eye candy cred maintenance, of waypoints so I can keep track of the interesting stuff I run across.

Update: Apologies for the typo in Andrew's name.

Minar: Firefox Tab Switching

2005-10-10T19:31:00-04:00

Serendipity in action. Thanks to reading Nelson Minar, I now know you can navigate tabs in Firefox using Ctrl-PgUp and Ctrl-PgDn. Hands not leaving the keyboard when editing, even in a Web browser, is a good thing.

Bye: Implementing Tagclouds

2005-10-10T19:22:00-04:00

Link parkin': Kent Bye working out the math on generating the HTML for tagclouds.

NMH: Where's "Watch My Blog"

2005-10-09T14:49:00-04:00

Just thinking out loud. Where's the tool that will watch what I write on my blog then analyze, summarize, and help remix it?. Inspired by thinking about a Movable Type into del.icio.us plug-in, but being convinced that's probably not the right place to put that functionality since editing becomes reliant on the uptime of another service.

The idea is that you write a post in MT, using a custom syntax mark some of the links as destined for del.icio.us, sit back and relax. Think of it as an alternative, and familiar, DIU posting interface.

NMH: I'm So Old III

2005-10-09T14:26:00-04:00

Tim O'Reilly edition.

GNNPress was kewl!!
I forgive you for putting TCL in GNNServer, but then again the scripting languge pickings were pretty slim back then.
A Camel for the Perl book? Brilliant!!
When hacking an X Windows (not X-Windows) server for OS/2 on the 80286, I always had a copy of the O'Reilly manuals handy. X10 no less!!
Of course, that traumatizing experience convinced me that James Gosling and Sun's NeWS was infinitely better. Still waiting for a popular GUI infrastructure with non-rectangular windows baked in and easy to use.
Regarding The NeWS Book: first hip-hop quote in a tech book I ever saw. Who knew Gosling listened to LL Cool J?

Gonze: Ning? Yeah!

2005-10-07T16:41:00-04:00

Lucas Gonze, who's measured, steady work on Webjay I find highly impressive, is saying good things about Ning. Maybe I'll have to take a closer look.

Hargittai: Web Use Project

2005-10-07T16:32:00-04:00

I was checking in on Eszter Hargittai, a colleague in NU's School of Communications, to see if her group had published some results related to political weblogs, only to found out she's launched a whole group, the Web Use Project, and attendant blog.

I've mentioned before that the TSB program in the School of Communications is making some interesting things happen around here, and Eszter's a big part of that.

P.S. This year's TSB speaker series, is looking as good as last year's, including Bruno Latour coming to town. All talks open to the public.

Berkun: Social SW Biases

2005-10-06T21:54:00-04:00

Self-admittedly late to the Web 2.0 party, Scott Berkun nevertheless manages to ask some really good questions, regarding social biases in the new generation of Web applications. Early adopters (can) drive the initial feature push, while latecomers bring different persepctives and desires. Inevitable friction? Similarly, can such systems tolerate high volume users and intermittent participants?

Interestingly, there's actually probably a decent body of academic and empirical work to build on, given the age and attraction of USENET, MOOs, MUDs, and MMORPGs. The question is, what are the contrasting features of Web 2.0 apps with those hoary old vets.

My guess? The Web underpinnings of Web 2.0 apps lead to much looser coupling of individuals and, on average, less frequent interactions. Net effect is you've got hordes of acquintances in a large shared environment. Maybe the correct analogy is that of a mega rock concert or festival.

Regular readers will note that the issue of social boundaries is a recurring theme here at NMH, not that I've actually done much about it. Berkun's questions were refreshing in that they didn't focus on RSS, AJAX, mashing up, or other buzzwords of the day.

Dean: BigTable

2005-10-05T18:10:00-04:00

Greg Linden watches Google Kirkland so I don't have to.

Jeff Dean of Google is giving a talk at UW on Oct 18th about BigTable, a system for noodling around with petabytes (!!) of data spread across thousands (!!) of machines. Thankfully it's on a Tuesday when my schedule is mostly clear and I can catch the webcast.

Simmons: NetNewsWire Bought

2005-10-04T22:54:00-04:00

Brent Simmons' wonderful NetNewsWire, has been bought by NewsGator. Kewl!! I always call NetNewsWire the gold standard of aggregators, and now that I'm back on the Mac at home, I'm really enjoying it's elegance once again.

NewsGator is now the only (?) webfeed aggregator vendor with a product on both major desktops, in Outlook, and has a web version. If they made a big deal with a blog/feed search engine, that would be a formidable client and service backend combination. Alternatively, NewsGator has to look tastier to folks like AskJeeves or Rupert Murdoch.

NMH: Ning? Yawn!

2005-10-04T22:35:00-04:00

The blogosphere has gone bananas over the Ning playground. From my quick scan of the developer docs and FAQS, we're talking about a hosted PHP app service, with some extra support for the fancy widgets of the day (tagclouds), webfeeds as sources and sinks, user/group management, and the ability to "clone" applications. There's no inherent support, that I can tell, for social applications, other than connections to many other Web apps which folks throw in the social bin.

Here's a challenge for someone who wants to build a social application platform. Come up with a calculus of social roles and boundaries. Design and implement a developer's toolkit that makes it easy for application writers to build social environments along a spectrum of concerns and expose social controls to their end users.

I'm surprised at how many folks have fallen for the buzzword compliance. Then again I have been known to be wrong.

Sandler, et. al.: feedtree live!!

2005-10-03T22:20:00-04:00

Earlier this year, I mentioned the FeedTree project out of Rice University. Dan Sandler was nice enough, simply on that mention, to clue me in to the alpha release of the project. Due to various and sundry events throughout August and September, I didn't have a chance to follow up, but I'll plug them again since the project appears to be quite a bit past alpha now.

As a reminder, the idea is to use P2P mechanisms to distribute webfeed changes, presumably helping publishers deal with hordes of bandwidth hungry aggregators. As an added bonus, updates can be pushed to clients before a regularly scheduled pull, leading to more timely updates.

Despite Tim Bray's extolling the virtues of Post and Poll, FeedTree is a worthy experiment. So if you've got an extra aggregator lying around, or publish a popular feed, look into giving FeedTree a try. What have you got to lose?

Clementson: Open Source Lisp Machine

2005-10-03T22:10:00-04:00

Actually the credit goes to Brad Parker, but Bill Clementson has the scoop on MIT finally giving up the rights to the LISPM source code for the greater good. +5 yourself on the geek scale if you understand why this is way cool and are now raising a toast to Stallman, Greenblatt, and Moon.

Remember Budd's little speech about sword's in Kill Bill Vol 2.? The LISPM was a Hattori Hanzo.

Via Ben Hyde

Webb: Attenuation, Next Buzzword?

2005-10-03T21:56:00-04:00

Given that the O'Reilly organization is latching onto the term, and Matt Webb has significantly expounded upon it, attentuation will be the next hot buzzword. Looking at the strict dictionary definition, I'm not sure that's actually a positive thing , but I believe they're focusing more on the engineering sense: reduction of signal amplitude to focus attention, which is a good thing.

While I think Webb's piece could benefit from a bit of attenuation itself, it usefully highlights how a number of mechanisms we use on real life to manage huge flows of information, haven't migrated into our Web based media. Thus there are huge design and implementation opportunities and challenges still to be exploited.

One of the attenuation/locality mechanisms that I've been pondering a bit is the power of temporal organization. The good old calendar and timeline have been dismissed recently in the weblog world as being non-functional, but I think there's a second breath of life for them. If small calendars become a bit more interactive (read AJAXy), the social norms and understandings we bring to them are pretty powerful.

For the most part, you don't have to teach people how to navigate a calendar, and a well designed, compact, interface like Bederson's DateLens provides a nice gateway to any number of underlying data icebergs. Out of the box it's a focus+context inteface using time as an attenuation device. In addition, people immediately bring their own landmarks (birthdays, deadlines, holidays, conferences, anniversaries) to the landscape.

Lots of mileage still to be traveled.

Musser: programmableweb

2005-09-30T18:47:00-04:00

Link parkin': John Musser's programmableweb monitor's public Web service APIs and catalogs them nicely.

Pell: Rollyo

2005-09-30T18:43:00-04:00

Rollyo has been all over the blogosphere, but I'm going to pile on because it's a damn good idea. As Rael Dornfest puts it, Rollyo supports attenuated search. Using the power of the Yahoo! Search API, you can focus searches on specific sets of sites.

Here's a no brainer, make it easy for people to import blogrolls as searchrolls. Voila! You can do focused searches against sources you already trust to see what they have to say on a topic.

Besides, any site with the luscious Rosario Dawson on board gets double thumbs up from me.

NMH: I'm So Old II

2005-09-30T18:33:00-04:00

Sports edition:

I'm so old I rooted for the Washington Bullets and even get where references to the Boulez', fat ladies, and Bullets fever come from.
I'm so old I saw the ball go through Bill Buckner's legs...Live!! In Boston!! (although not at Fenway)
I'm so old I saw Redskins/Cowboys on Monday Night in RFK, and Joe Theismann was there. On the field.
I'm so old I think the Montreal Olympics was the best I've ever seen.
I'm so old, that as an Orioles fan, I'm still suffering from that last Pittsburgh Pirates world series. We... Are... Family... yeah whatever

CRA: FY 2006 Computing Funding

2005-09-29T12:55:00-04:00

Consider the source, but the Computing Research Association breaks down the shape of the US Govt's Fiscal Year 2006 research appropriations. The skinny? Things were looking grim pre-Katrina, with the real dollar equivalent of budget cuts being applied to many of the agencies (NSF, DOE, NASA, et. al.) where academic computing gets its funding. Post-Katrina, the odds are looking up for even deeper across the board cuts at places like NSF.

With the Department of Defense trending towards more short term, technology transferish projects, funding is getting hairy for research computing. Boo hoo for ivory tower types I know, but computing used to be a national competitive advantage. Now we're falling back to the pack.

Gawker: Deadspin

2005-09-29T12:43:00-04:00

Sports, biting wit, blogging. What's not to like about Gawker media's new blog Deadspin? Anybody who thinks Woody Paige is a buffoon gets bonus points in my book.

orchard: xbox hacking

2005-09-26T12:46:00-04:00

Thanks to l.m. orchard, I now know that XBox Media Center is eminently hackable, even having some nice Python based tools onboard. XBox Media Center is an open source media player that runs on top of MicroSoft's XBox. In essence, you get a platform for turning your XBox into a hackable home media player.

This might be the excuse I need to actually get a game console. Also, you could probably hook kids who don't have a lot of money/wherewithal for a desktop (think disadvantaged urban youth), into some programming.

Watson: Flickr Toys

2005-09-24T23:20:00-04:00

flagrantdisregard, a.k.a. John Watson, has been noodling about with the Flickr API for awhile now, and has accreted a fine set of toys that create things from photos posted on Flickr.

NMH: I'm So Old...

2005-09-23T23:49:00-04:00

Apropos of a whimsical Friday evening, last week was New Student Week at NU, and by a set of weird circumstances I wound up having to help advise freshmen. The original colleague on duty had a conference to attend. His substitute suddently got called away to do a DARPA dog and pony show, leaving moi' to be part of the first impression 17 or so youngsters received from Northwestern.

No big deal other than this was a reminder that 20 years ago, I was a freshman at M.I.T. There's nothing like interacting with a bunch of folks who didn't even exist when you were a freshman in college to bring your mortality home.

To commemorate this savage reminder from above, I am now christening a new (the only?) regular feature of New Media Hack, "I'm So Old..." scheduled to appear on Fridays. In this week's edition:

I'm so old I'm older than the World Wide Web
I'm so old we used Zephyr for instant messaging.
I'm so old USENET was where all the kewl kidz hung out, including Kibo!
I'm so old I played games on a Commodore 64... And liked it!!
I'm so old 8-track tape players were the iPods of middle school.

Misery loves company, that is all.

SixApart: Project Comet

2005-09-23T23:22:00-04:00

Innovation in the blog publishing tool space has been a bit slow lately if you ask me. Self tagging for tools like Technorati, and a re-emergence of link blogging, energized by Web based tools like del.icio.us are about the extent of the excitement. Correct me if I'm wrong oh loyal readers.

SixApart, which had a big hand in launching a couple of the last Big Things (TM) is making noises as if it wants to strike gold a second time with Planet Comet, detailed a bit more in this press release and by Richard Macmanus on his Web 2.0 ZDNet blog.

From the screen captures though, I'm hard pressed to see anything really spanking new. A lot of the photo sharing sites, e.g. Fotki are starting to morph and integrate much of what I can see of Project Comet.

Linden: Findory Feed Reader II

2005-09-22T09:51:00-04:00

Findory, headed up by Greg Linden, just unleashed a Bloglines style feed aggregator, but with Findory's personalization mechanisms baked in. Explicit focus plus manufactured serendipity. Will definitely have to kick the tires on this one.

Burton: TailRank

2005-09-21T21:50:00-04:00

Kevin Burton, a founder of Rojo recently set sail for new shores. His new venture is TailRank which is in that terminally annoying invite-only phase (thanks for reminding me to forget about your product until later), but still seems interesting. Looks like TailRank will be a weblog and webfeed search engine that will try to use social information to present results further from the popular peaks.

Not to pick on Kevin, but if Web 2.0 crashes and burns spectacularly, I'm sure invite-only betas will be a highly mocked archetype of the era.

No smilies for the humour impaired.

NMH: Workin' On Tha Groove

2005-09-20T23:03:00-04:00

Apropos of nothing, while it wasn't too painful getting back on the air, it feels a bit trickier getting back in the posting groove. I was cooking throughout the summer. Let's see if I can't close out the year in fine fashion.

Merholz: Laptop Mobility

2005-09-20T22:58:00-04:00

In an earlier post, I conjectured that laptops are "the briefcase of the new millenium". I'm glad to see I'm in good company as none other than Peter Merholz wonders why product designers don't take advantage of laptop mobility. He's also another observer of the growing trend towards the laptop showing up in leisure time, probably due to its capabilities as a coordination (synching with others), navigation (maps, directions), and interstitial (dvds, games, photo munging) tool.

Guilty as charged for taking the laptop on vacation.

Innoscript: Porcupine

2005-09-20T22:43:00-04:00

If I didn't know any better I'd think Porcupine == (Zope - HTTP server), given the feature list.

Just what the world needs. Yet Another Python Web Application Framework.

Rheingold: Literacy of Cooperation Videos

2005-09-19T22:01:00-04:00

Howard Rheingold ran a class at Stanford entitled "The Literacy of Cooperation". The course focused on how humans collectively get things done, outside of well studied "market forces". There were a number of interesting speakers for the class, and their sessions were recorded. I'm particularly interested in what Bernardo Huberman and Paul Hartzog had to say.

NMH: Back in tha Game!

2005-09-18T19:20:00-04:00

Sort of. The new DNS entries for the NU CS, errr EECS, department are taking forevah to propagate. So costarica's hardware is on the air but its name to ip address mapping is a bit dodgy at the moment.

Like I said, there'd be some rough edges.

NMH: So Sue Me

2005-09-12T15:30:00-04:00

All right, I'm going to be off a few days on that hiatus estimate. Our department is being moved, wholesale, to a new building, right at the beginning of the academic year. Servers, including the one supporting this fine blog and webfeed, are going to be shipped willy nilly across campus. This is alleged to start on Wednesday, which means good old costarica will be powered down, sometime on Tuesday. While I can't predict exactly what they are, I'm anticipating some glitches somewhere.

With any luck, I'll be back on the air by Monday. Consider anything else gravy.

Ciao!!

NMH: Hiatusing

2005-09-02T16:35:00-04:00

Yeah, I know it's not a word. But between the long weekend, travel with intermittent network access, the upcoming Fall quarter at Northwestern, and to top it all off, the post-Katrina nightmare, it seems like a good time for this here blog to take an extended break. I'll see you on the other side of September 8th with more new media hackery.

Ob link: The fine folks at Flickr have released a major extension to their web service API that let's you find out what photosets, and more importantly, group pools a photo participates in. This is majorly geeky, but you can now take the identifier of a Flickr photo and do some extensive social network navigation using the photo as a starting point. Interestingly, you can walk along human to human connections, and media to media connections, through tags, sets, pools, and contacts.

NMH: Blogday

2005-08-31T23:26:00-04:00

As promised, for BlogDay, here are five new blogs I've used to seed my Rojo account, first to expand my reading horizon, second to get some experience using Rojo.

Koranteng's Toli is the rambling musings of Koranteng Ofosu-Amaah, a native of Ghana. Ofosu-Amaah is working for IBM/Lotus in my old digs of Cambridge, MA.

Sokari Ekine's Afrotecnik is a technology oriented adjunct to the well known Black Looks.

In an alternate universe, I wouldn't mind being Keith Jenkins, author of Good Reputation Sleeping. DC based photojournalist, now photo editor for The Washington Post, and his son and I apparently share a birthday

Ndesanjo Macha writes about politics, technology, culture, and media on the African continent, in two languages no less!

I find Lynne d Johnson's diary a little overdesigned for my taste, but can't resist the combination of hip-hop and technology. But that's what aggregators are for!! Besides, she's got serious chops, proving yet again that journalism combined with technology fearlessness can lead to powerful effects. She probably doesn't need me to prop her up, though.

Side note: I'm mildly chuffed that I couldn't find a single decent house music weblog. Granted I didn't serch that long, but seems like there's a huge opportunity for some ground level reporting on this club scene. Or if I'm just ignorant, someone please fill me in.

Just for Technorati blogday, BlogDay2005.

Dodds & Gonze: Social SW and REST

2005-08-30T23:54:00-04:00

Leigh Dodds produced a well written survey of REST and social software intersections. I use the term intersection since many of the services described, the usual suspects, implement the REST philosophy less than completely. Dodd's also discusses some best practices for building such systems in a RESTful fashion.

I ran across this article from Lucas Gonze's detailed examination of Webjay and REST. It's a good look at one developer's real world set of design choices.

Chim: Personal Bee

2005-08-29T11:55:00-04:00

Nicholas Chim's Personal Bee project is some confirmation that a lot of what I've been thinking about in terms of aggregators isn't out in left field. The Bee watches bunches of feeds, does some term analysis of the items that come across a bunch, and generates a tagcloud for navigating the items. TechCrunch has a good overview, but it's something like a personal scale Google News.

Lots of mileage in this idea.

NMH: Katrina, Ivan, Grand Cayman

2005-08-28T21:20:00-04:00

Maybe I should institute a a weekly Grand Cayman mention here on NMH.

Hurrican Katrina is a Category 5 hurricane and about to lay waste to a big chunk of the Third Coast.

According to Wikipedia, 2004's Hurricane Ivan was a Cat 5 'cane, when it passed by Grand Cayman. Amazing the level of detail on Wikipedia. When I was on Grand Cayman this past July, 10 months after Ivan, the place was still devastated. The hotel my wife and I stayed at, literally got a brand new beach out of the deal. We were regaled with stories of winds blowing so strong through staircase openings that the air felt like knives. Granted, Grand Cayman isn't the US, but it's not exactly third world.

Just a guess, but this year's Sugar Bowl might be in jeopardy. Heck, Mardi Gras is not a definite.

Debaty, et. al.: StoryCast

2005-08-28T13:27:00-04:00

StoryCast looks like a neat little system for creating and publishing audio annotated photo slideshows with a handheld device. There's a little more detail in an HP techreport.

Arrington & Teare: TechCrunch & Flock

2005-08-27T16:17:00-04:00

TechCrunch is a recently launched blog dedicated to coverage of Web 2.0 applications. Edited by Michael Arrington and Keith Teare, TechCrunch is based out of Archimedes Ventures, a venture capital firm. Looks like they're essentially making a bit of their internal research visible to the outside world to garner mindshare and pick up bits of early feedback on emerging technologies. Interesting strategy.

As an example, they've gathered some initial data on Flock, apparently a Firefox mutant with social bookmarking and weblog editing baked in. From what I've seen so far, the TechCrunch team seems to have pretty good radar, so it's probably worth a webfeed subscription.

FlickrZens: On Interestingness

2005-08-26T21:27:00-04:00

When Flickr first announced "interestingness" I declared "let the gaming begin". There's at least one Flickr group, with a decent burst of activity, devoted to cataloging interesting photos along with occasional debates on how the ranking algorithm works. Not to mention a few long, interesting, discussion threads, regarding the relative merits of interestingness and discovering good new images.

The more active and/or older members of Flickr seem relatively hostile to interestingness which seems to have a heavy component of popularity baked into it. The more experienced folks seem to want tools for navigating smaller social spheres, as exemplified by this conversation. I'm often struck by how popularity is valuable because it's a cheap, easy indicator, built out of lots of evaluations, of certain qualities. However, once you get out past those low hanging fruit, or start measuring different qualities, the useful indicators are hard to find.

As social media environments become massively richer in, and expose more, metadata it'll be interesting to see how tools for semionauts are designed and constructed. Marcos Weskamp's FlickrGraph is about the closest thing I've seen and that only let's you explore the underlying social network, leaving out photos, the central media of Flickr!!

NMH: Unleashing Technorati

2005-08-25T22:25:00-04:00

Just thinking outloud. Lot's of folks are unhappy with Technorati. Technorati has two goals which seem to be giving it a lot of difficulty: comprehensiveness and timeliness. They're trying real hard to watch all of the blogosphere as fast as possible. The scale issue, especially with the explosion of spam blogs, puts severe constraints on the choice of indexing and search algorithms they can use. The speed issue sets up unrealistic expectations, which frankly, I'm not sure add much value. The pre-eminence of the scoop mentality is just a transference from mainstream journalism and doesn't really work on the Web.

What if Technorati developed and promoted another smaller, slower archive? Slower meaning the index is only updated say once a day, or even once a week. Smaller meaning it has a much higher, but transparent, threshold of what constitutes a "blog" and what gets indexed. With the added slack, more sophisticated algorithms for eliminating spam blogs could be incorporated. Similarly, interesting query and navigation tools, like Adina Levine's conversation clouds, could be built. Sure they wouldn't be realtime but sometimes it's good to slow down. Also, given the temporal nature of blogs, useful retrospection tools could be built.

As an added exemplar, Google News severely compromises on the scale axis, but in return provides other useful functionality, e.g. topic clustering.

SixApart: MT 3.2 Released

2005-08-25T21:51:00-04:00

Movable Type 3.2 is officially out of beta. The free version for individuals has returned, once again with unlimited weblogs.

Lohr: On Techies & More

2005-08-24T16:10:00-04:00

Steve Lohr of the NY Times does a drive-by on battling dropping computer science enrollment. Two NU connections. First, NU's own Robin Hunicke, told a similar story to Microsoft's games folks earlier this summer. Second, the Jamika Burge mentioned in Lohr's article is a sometimes collaborator of my advisee Azzari Jarrett. I know you're happy for me.

My two cents on the cs enrollment "crisis"? Smart undergrads (and intelligent people in general) have figuread out that there's a lot of interesting and powerful things you can do with computers without having to suffer the rather unpleasant beatdown that Architecture, Operating Systems, Compilers, Networking, and Theory (typical required elements of a CS degree) often inflict. Along with the overwhelming caveman hacker ethic (me like command line), it'll be interesting to see if traditional CS departments can successfully find a way to let go of a few of these pillars and still maintain their engineering and scientific self-respect.

Alternatively, they could go all aggro and start selling hard to people interested in computational biology, nanotech, complex systems and networks, etc. Meanwhile, the "soft" stuff could be left to departments like Berkeley's SIMS, Indiana's School of Informatics, Irvine's school of Information and Computer Sciences, and of course The Media Lab.

2enwtine: Gush and Gtalk

2005-08-24T15:46:00-04:00

The first thing I thought about when I heard that Google Talk was going to be Jabber/XMPP based was, "Wonder if it works with Gush?".

Answer: Affirmative, although the current results are probably a bit disappointing. Also, you don't get the voice stuff that Google's desktop app provides.

Why bother? Well Gush is still an amazingly visually pleasing way to do IM, which counts big if you're going to IM a lot.

Hagberg: NetworkX

2005-08-24T15:39:00-04:00

Link parkin': Aric Hagberg's NetworkX is a Python package for experimenting with complex networks. Looks like it also incorporates connections with drawing packages such as matplotlib and GraphViz.

Rocherolle & Wilder: Shoebox

2005-08-23T12:06:00-04:00

Narendra Rocherolle and Nick Wilder, a couple of the hackers behind the long in the tooth Webshots, cooked up Shoebox, a "vertical" social bookmarking and aggregation application. Shoebox is for bookmarking images on the Web, and watching webfeed streams of photos. Pursuant to its focus on images, Shoebox has a decidedly different presentation style. I think there are any number of applications like Shoebox, which ride on top of the webfeed ecology, but to the average user, don't look anything like an aggregator.

Shoebox development has a blog and Rocherolle's contains a lot of insight into Webshots, which is way older and way bigger than Flickr.

Memo to Webshots. Flash popunders are exceedingly painful. Please make it stop!!

NewsGator: Online APIs

2005-08-23T11:55:00-04:00

Hmmm, with this new set of APIs, it looks like NewsGator is starting to emerge as an interesting platform to develop aggregator experiments. The combination of an online component, a desktop component in FeedDemon, and automated control through the APIs makes a tempting target.

Park & Newman: Football Ranking

2005-08-22T22:01:00-04:00

Glad to know that the physics community has taken on the critical issue of proper mathematical treatment of American collegiate football rankings. And that network analysis is an important element!! Only Mark Newman could pull off something like that.

Actually, for those aspiring blogosphere index builders, much of Newman's work should be required reading.

Google: Sidebar

2005-08-22T12:22:00-04:00

If the Konfabulator crew hadn't merged with Yahoo! they'd be tearing their hair out. Google, while beefing up the Google Desktop app, has added Google Sidebar: "a panel on your desktop which provides convenient, one-glance access to all sorts of personalized information." Said Sidebar has a developer's API to leverage the long tail of free coder time.

A quick scan of the Google Desktop dev docs indicates all sorts of COM interfacing bits, with nasty, pointy sharp teeth. +1 for Konfabulator.

Cagle: RSS/Atom & Web Services

2005-08-21T16:20:00-04:00

Kurt Cagle, a prominent SVG developer, put together a detailed and philosophical argument about RSS/Atom as a payload for Web services. I noodled about on this topic a few days ago, but Cagle beat me by a month and brings much more depth. Of particular note is the contrast with what's going on in the SOAP community, which seems to be hamstrung by its RPC model and overengineered specifications.

del.icio.us: JavaScript Output

2005-08-20T16:57:00-04:00

As evidenced by activity on the del.icio.us blog, steam is picking up on feature development for the social bookmark service. Now you can make queries againt your bookmarks and receive the results in JavaScript code or JSON, language neutral JavaScript objects. This will make it easier to incorporate del.icio.us into AJAX, browser side JavaScript, applications since the apps won't have to internalize XML.

Also, this potentially provides a standard client side object model for tagged bookmarks across all JavaScript del.icio.us applications. And conceivably any other bookmark service (Furl, spurl, unalog) could output data in the same format, leading to an "industry" standard.

Gregorio: httpcache.py

2005-08-19T22:34:00-04:00

Link parkin': Joe Gregorio has cooked up a Python module to make URL fetching using ETag and gzip caching easier. Probably should have thrown in If-Modified for extra style points.

Salus: Dept. 1127 Gone

2005-08-18T09:38:00-04:00

Alan Kay gets downsized. NU CS gets contracted. Bell Labs groundbreaking UNIX department is officially dead.

Okay, one of these things doesn't belong but still, moment of silence for the real pid 1... Thank you very much.

Hat tip to Paul Boutin.

Bicking: Ruby contra Python

2005-08-17T23:00:00-04:00

I'm about due for another serious big dive into a new programming language (c.f. Norvig "Teach Yourself Programming in 10 Years"). For a while I thought it was going to be Php, but I think I'll just hold my nose and learn just enough to do the Web hacking I need to do. However, Ruby is starting to look a bit more palatable, especially after Ian Bicking's comprehensive feature comparison of Ruby and Python. Ruby, Python "Power" is not really a versus piece with a "scorecard" and "in the final analysis, the winner is" bit, but a well organized work of comparison and contrast.

WWW2005: Weblogging Ecosystem Workshop

2005-08-17T22:48:00-04:00

Yup. It already happened. But as Lilia Efimova points out, with all the noise around Top N lists, rankings, conversations, and clouds it might be a good time to re/visit what's been going on in the academy regarding analyzing the blogosphere, especially in finding community. If you're trawling for useful material, some of Andrew Tomkins work is a good place to start.

Ali: Burden of Permission

2005-08-17T22:01:00-04:00

Rafat Ali distills the Google Library contretemps into its essence: permission or forgiveness? Looks like the publishers aren't the forgiving kind, especially with coin on the table.

Dybwad: Social Bookmark Wishlist

2005-08-16T23:45:00-04:00

Barb Dybwad's list of suggestions for social bookmark services is good stuff. I can't really do it justice with a summary so just go read it. (And I really hate posts that say that.)

Her list points out one of the issues with centralized Web services. Since these aren't pluggable applications, the rate of innovation is gated by the developers who have access to the backend code. Web service APIs are a start to building new applications but from what I've seen, apps built on top of them rarely get folded back into the main service.

Sherman's: Art Cities

2005-08-16T23:23:00-04:00

Speaking of spurious lists, Sherman's Travel ranked Chicago in the top 10 of cities for art lovers, along with other venerable destinations like London, Berlin, and Florence.

As a Bay Area refugee, I often get asked to compare the two metro areas. I love both but culturallly, Chicago just crushes SF.

Feedster: Top 500 Blogs

2005-08-16T23:13:00-04:00

Feedster launches a challenger to the Technorati 100. Kudos for making the raw data available, although what little is known about the ranking algorithm still leaves it pretty opaque.

Some of the squawking about who is and isn't on the list reminds me of two things: 1) the definition of a weblog is a bit tricky, 2) some folks need to be on a list, any list, to prop up their own self-esteem.

I'm not with Jeff Jarvis on much, but tools that focused on surfacing small worlds, would be much more useful

NMH: REST + RSS/Atom

2005-08-15T21:40:00-04:00

Thought parkin': one of the downsides to designing and building a RESTful application is that you have to come up with a document format for your HTTP responses. Then you have to inform all your clients what that format is. And then they have to figure out how to injest your format.

With the proliferation of webfeeds, any one of the many RSS flavors or Atom could fulfill the document format role in a pinch. There still has to be a bit of coordination on how to interpret the items in the feed, but at least you're a step up the abstraction ladder wth much less coupling of server and clients.

If you can't think of anything better, strikes me that Atom or RSS should just be the default.

Carleton: RG in CI

2005-08-15T21:32:00-04:00

Apropos of nothing: The Roaming Gnome visited the Cayman Islands. Photos courtesy of John Carleton.

Thanks to my own trip there, I now have a permanent soft spot for the CI.

Golder & Huberman: The Structure of Collaborative Tagging

2005-08-15T21:22:00-04:00

Neat work done by Scott Golder and Bernardo Huberman on the dynamics and structure of our favorite tagging system, del.icio.us. The actual data set may not be all that representative (it was taken over a weekend and looks only at popular URLs), but the analysis is clear and rigorous. Maybe efforts like this will nudge Joshua Schachter to release a few comprehensive del.icio.us datasets for examination.

Crawford: The Biblioblogosphere

2005-08-14T13:46:00-04:00

Walt Crawford regularly writes, and writes well, on a wide variety of library and technology related issues. His recent issue of Cites & Insights contains a thorough study of the behavior and reach of a large number of library related weblogs. For those who have the time, one way to make a case for reading non A-list blogs are investigations like these.

Software tools that ease small scale analyses of blog communities could go a long way towards expanding horizons.

Linden: Findory Feed Reader

2005-08-14T13:37:00-04:00

Fed up with current feed reader limitations, Greg Linden and Findory came up with their own aggregator. I'm sure it will tend towards simplicity over complexity, but it will be interesting to see how the additional information from users will play with Findory's personalization mechanisms.

Salmon: Fantasy Fashion League

2005-08-13T13:05:00-04:00

Dang! Back in late 2004, early 2005 a colleague and I were kicking around ideas forn an online project with a major media concern. One thing that came up was fantasy leagues for folks who don't like sports, e.g. a Red Carpet Fantasy League for spring awards season. Minor details about team composition and scoring to be determined. Granted it's not a uniquely brilliant idea, but I hadn't seen anyone execute it online.

Enter Erica Salmon's Fantasy Fashion League. You draft major designers and scoring is based upon appearances in major fashion rags like Women's Wear Daily and Vogue. They're even planning for next year's Oscars!!

My only suggestion would be to make the leagues and partcipants a little more visible. Half the fun of these things are seeing what's happening in other circles besides your own. A little egoboo and exhibition play can help fuel a community.

Via Everything And Nothing

Niles: OJR Future

2005-08-13T12:44:00-04:00

The Online Journalism Review has been going through some changes. In general, I've been digging OJR more, mainly because they got a decent RSS feed, but the features have been much deeper recently, and the video journalism project was a nice experiment. Editor-in-chief Robert Niles is exploring new directions for the publication, with a healthy mix of optimism and thoughtful consideration about what's worth doing at OJR. With the support of USC's Annenberg School they have a unique soapbox that affords the potential for big impact.

Found the following quote quite amusing though:

Unfortunately, CARR has remained a specialty within journalism, rather than a core skill. Part of this can be attributed to journalists' collective hostility toward math and science. I've been training journalists in basic math for a decade, and in my experience, it is far easier to teach someone with high math aptitude how to report and write a journalism story than it is to teach a typical journalist math.

There's a bit of rhetoric in journalism education about "understanding an increasingly ccomplex world", but if math/statistical skills are a key tool in understanding complexity (much less computing) what does the above quote portend?

Rogers: PageRank Explained

2005-08-13T12:33:00-04:00

Link parkin': Nice overview of PageRank by Ian Rogers. Chock full of examples to boot!!

Ofir: BlogDay 2005

2005-08-11T14:35:00-04:00

I'm going to take up the challenge and try to expand my blog reading horizons by participating in BlogDay 2005.

Hat tip to Ben Hyde.

Baseball Prospectus: Takeover Target?

2005-08-10T17:06:00-04:00

A long time ago, I was a big devotee of Baseball Prospectus, a baseball site driven by the Bill James school of thought: highly valuing rigorous statistical analysis to explain performance in the sport. They always had great stuff, but I lost track of them after they partially went behind a pay wall. BP's stuff also was very professionally done despite most of the authors not being traditional journalists. It was a nice example of productive citizens media without being blogging.

Well despite my trepidations, it looks like BP is thriving. PaidContent even has them as a potential purchase for the suddenly voracious Fox Interactive Media, although a large grain of salt needs to be taken with the report.

Apropos of nothing. Wow! That BP post was my actual first item with real content. Gosh, has it been that long?

Glaser: Gray Lady's New Newsroom

2005-08-10T16:52:00-04:00

Hefty. Mark Glaser's piece on the NY Times merging its online and print newsrooms is a worthwhile, if time consuming, read. The article is both a feature on the event and an interview with Martin Nisenholtz, tops at NYT Digital, and Bill Keller, big kahuna of the print editorial side.

While there's been a bit of Web triumphalism going on, I'm of a mind that this will only be as good as the number of effective bridgers in the mix. Folks like Adrian Holovaty who understand the rhythm and codes of the newsroom but can really hack too.

This isn't unprecedented, MSNBC has done good stuff with a similar mentality as well as a number of smaller print concerns, but it may be the final stamp of legitimacy needed to push along the slow pokes in the hinterlands. "If it's good enough for The Times...". Along with what the Associated Press is doing, we may also see an impetus for journalism educators to more aggressively address how to prep their students for these new newsrooms.

Then again, there's a part of me that wants to establish an over/under on time to split out a business unit to "capitalize on the unique online opportunities the merged newsroom has been missing." Apples to oranges, but we were digging on that AOL/TimeWarner merger once upon a time too.

ActiveState: Now Blogging

2005-08-10T16:05:00-04:00

ActiveState provides professional support for many of the open source scripting languages. They've just launched a company blog.

boyd: Link Biases

2005-08-09T13:17:00-04:00

danah boyd's The Biases of Links, seems to be a point of coalescence for a number of issues I occasionally snipe at: network structure in the blogosphere, blog crawling, aggregator design, etc. etc. Someone should really follow up on her informal analysis with a little more rigor to see if the patterns bear out.

Pondering Calacanis' challenge and Finkelstein's musings, I realized there's a certain flaw with Technorati's authority lists. As far as I can tell, they actually don't serve any purpose other than promotion. A close read of the original Google search engine paper indicates that PageRank was developed specifically to support improved relevance based upon traditional IR techniques. PageRank has a specific purpose in life.

If Technorati authority is supposed to help their keyword search, I'm missing the connection. Authority is "just" a promotional vehicle. If you want to reach people and influence minds then that has a lot of value if a lot of folks pay attention. In some sense, spending money to improve the rankings has to be balanced against promoting Technorati's corporate visibility.

Since I'm not as invested in the politics of the blogosphere as others (no blogroll, no comments, no trackback), what's my angle? Well, if aggregators are going to morph, they need good metadata about information ecologies, cleanly exposed. Mary Hodder and friends took a stab at cooking up a new ranking system, which is fraught with all sorts of issues (lots of noisy inputs, some quite hard to get, complex remixing) but thinking about engines that support such ideas is a wide open area of research.

Wyman: PubSub Hype #

2005-08-08T10:00:00-04:00

PubSub is doing well over 1 trillion matches a day according to Bob Wyman. Essentially for a couple hundred thousand standing queries against about 14 million sources, watching a big chunk of the blogosphere is eminently doable.

In response to a snarky commenter ("Big deal! Small number of subs, and small number of events."), Wyman jogged me to think about two other things that might make the hype # more interesting: 1) latency between post discovery and completion of matching against all subs, 2) what the heck are people using PubSub for? Other than vanity searches.

Shay: BigPAPI

2005-08-07T19:10:00-04:00

As someone who's hacked up a custom editing interface through older editions of MovableType, Kevin Shay's BigPAPI plug-in is a welcome edition. Writing the backend of a user facing extension is relatively painless, but integrating into the standard MT interface was a relative pain. BigPAPI, as described in Anil Dash's overview, is "server-side Greasemonkey for Movable Type". SixApart's pro developer's network, also has a good BigPAPI tutorial, penned by Shay.

Garrett & Costello: Into Flickr

2005-08-06T18:54:00-04:00

Jesse James Garrett conducts a nice, wide ranging interview about Flickr with Eric Costello, lead client UI developer for the photo sharing site. Just lots of good background material on where Flickr came from and how it operates. For example, some of Flickr's inspiration came from Neopets. I wrote about Neopets before Flickr even existed but didn't take the media objects as community focus angle.

Thumbs up to Garrett for usefully condensing what I'm sure was quite a bit of material.

Vande Moere: Information Aesthetics

2005-08-05T11:17:00-04:00

From one of the loveliest cities Down Under, Sydney, Andrew Vande Moere puts together infosthetics. Appropriately elegantly designed, both visually and intellectually.

Hat tip to Smart Mobs who was propagating the fine thoughts of one Fernanda Vi

Calacanis: Blog Ranking Bounty

2005-08-04T23:54:00-04:00

Jason Calacanis' $10,000 bounty for a better Technorati 100 is quite amusing. Not only for the cheekiness of the thrown gauntlet, but the comments which illustrate the many facets of this challenging problem.

As an added bonus (is there any other kind?) I stumbled upon PubSub's linkcounts, another interesting posting flow tool and their site stats feature. Neato stuff, but I bet since their data is feed based, you'd see significant variation from something like Technorati, whose rankings are based on scraping site front pages. That and PubSub seems to conflate blogs with last 2 elements of domain name, which is a bit problematic...

I'm wondering if there isn't a Google moment about to happen somewhere out there. A couple of enterprising computer science grad students pull in an idea from another academic discipline (percolation theory?), engineer the hell out of the implementation, execute cleanly on the user interface, and ride off to fame and fortune.

Glaser: Into Topix

2005-08-03T19:31:00-04:00

Mark Glaser has an in-depth interview with the brains behind Topix.net, Rich Skrenta and Chris Tolles. It's mildly entertaining, mainly for the economics of the business, but not a huge amount of tech insight. Still worth a peek to see Paul Graham's startup wisdom in action yet again.

I have to chastise Glaser though. I didn't know there were degrees of perfect.

Vinson: Lektora Thoughts

2005-08-03T14:43:00-04:00

I'm approaching the 180 webfeeds subscribed to mark and Bloglines is starting to get a bit creaky. Or maybe it's just my innate techno wanderlust. I've already got a Rojo account so maybe it's time to jump ship, although on the times I've tried it, I've found their interface irritating. Jack Vinson also has a few nuggets on Lektora and Blogbridge looks like it might have potential, despite my Java Webstart trepidations.

Turbak & Gifford: PL Textbook

2005-08-03T14:36:00-04:00

Dave Gifford and Lyn Turbak are shopping a book on modern programming language design principles. Targeted at CS grad students, the table of contents outlines topices in Design Concepts in Programming Languages that will make most people's heads explode. Including mine!! However, stuff like this is useful for every self-respecting CS graduate student and it's too bad we haven't been able to solidify our PLDI offerings here at NU.

Flickr: Shiny New Toys

2005-08-02T10:42:00-04:00

So it's been a while since Flickr got swallowed by Yahoo! They've been mumbling about moving to the Bay Area, new data centers, improving the Web services API, yadda, yadda. I wish they'd get around to adding a new feature or two. Another month or two and they're going to lose their hipster cred.

Oh, wait. Never mind.

Clustering looks like a straightforward application of some well known information retrieval techniques. But an interesting thing about interestingness is that you now have automated egoboo. Let the gaming begin!!

Gonze: Webby A/V

2005-08-02T10:13:00-04:00

Lucas Gonze is really on point with this thought:

Most of the doodads that people are dreaming up to help web audio and video to take off are beside the point. The challenge is making A/V more webby, not changing the web to accomodate A/V.

Going reductionist, if a human authorable URL scheme for specifying in/out points on continuous media became widely adopted, A/V would become first class on the Web.

Udell: Federated Folksonomy

2005-08-01T12:57:00-04:00

Jon Udell touches on the potential for connecting different autonomous tagging systems. We both agree that a Wiki style, inter-system reference language has potential, but Udell adds in the utility of aggregators and meta-search engines.

There's probably enough instantations of these systems, c.f. Connotea, del.icio.us, CiteULike, that a watch/buzz engine specific to them would be useful.

Moment of silence for Gataga... Thank you very much.

AOL: MyAOL

2005-08-01T12:37:00-04:00

When AOL announced that they were going to provide blogging tools to their members, there were apocalyptic pronouncements from the blogosphere both pro and con. My how times have changed.

AOL is beta releasing a new webfeed aggreagator, MyAOL, and receives not much more than cursory nods. While apparently similar to MyYahoo!, if AOL delivers on some of the coming attractions, MyAOL could be a nice product.

Rose, Clarke, Voas: Free Konfabulator

2005-07-31T11:38:00-04:00

Konfabulator is a neat little desktop sandbox for running small JavaScript applications. Originally a MacOS application, it sort of got bigfooted by Apple's Dashboard. Yahoo recently bought Konfabulator, and made it free. Yeah!

I forsee a plethora of Konfabulator widgets exploiting the many Yahoo APIs.

NMH: Dude! Where's My Department?

2005-07-30T11:06:00-04:00

Despite appearances to the contrary, the Northwestern Department of Computer Science no longer exists. Now I'm appointed in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Living in interesting times.

Morin: kbCafe search

2005-07-30T10:54:00-04:00

Link parkin': kbsearch is Randy Charles Morin's meta-search engine of blog watch engines.

Butterfield: DoYourWorst

2005-07-30T10:48:00-04:00

As a way of blowing off a little steam, a couple of Flickr employees launched a tag and pool for self-inflicted ugly photos, aptly named DoYourWorst.

Why am I pointing to this? Because while it may be a minority use, I maintain that tags as "social events/spaces" is an important use. In fact if I could figure out an objective means of classifying users tagging behavior as event or classification, the current high profile focus, an interesting study would be to look at the varied social tagging services, compare and contrast their features and see what style they encourage.

Even though Flickr and del.icio.us have very similar tag mechanisms there's something qualitatively different about how they're used. Something that's worth analyzing, quantifying, and understanding for future software designers.

Dash: MT 3.2 DB Support

2005-07-29T09:54:00-04:00

A long time ago, I lauded Movable Type for supporting a variety of database backends. This feature allowed for a wide range of installation scenarios. Apparently this ability got lost in recent vintages of MT for the whizzy dynamic publishing capablities.

Anil Dash concurs with me (;-)) and reports that PostgreSQL and SQLite DBs can be used with dynamic publishing. Some of the GIS, XML, and extensibility features in PostgreSQL could be put to amazing effect for an enterprising MT extension hacker.

Google Labs: Sawzall & MapReduce

2005-07-29T09:46:00-04:00

Thanks to Greg Linden's careful eye on Google Labs one can start to see some of the value of all those PhD's at Google. First, PLDI (amongst other things) expert Jeff Dean, along with Sanjay Ghemawat, cooks up a domain specific programming model and implementation that allows J. Random Hacker at Google to easily crunch lots of data across many machines. Next UNIX legend Rob Pike and team take the baton and start sloshing around petabytes of data at a time by building a new language on top of Dean's work.

When you have a toolbox with gadgets like this in it, tasks such as blog analysis and aggregation are cast in a much different light. High end toolmakers are major force multipliers in military speak.

Flickr: 1e6 Members

2005-07-29T09:31:00-04:00

According to Heather Champ, Flickr has a million members. Wow!! A good idea, solid execution, and a dash of agility (remember Game Never Ending and Flickr Chat), go a long way. Note that Flickr isn't much more than a year old.

Hodder: Blog "Search" Comparison

2005-07-28T21:52:00-04:00

Mary Hodder has a nice overview of how various blog tracking services work. Be sure to check out the feature comparison chart, but the key point to take away is that services like Bloglines, Blogpulse, Technorati, PubSub, Feedster et. al. are barely in the same business as Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. Sure various of them take stabs at keyword searching of posts, but their bread and butter is in trend tracking; mainly via link watching but with the potential for more sophisticated analyses down the road.

Mochi Media: MochiKit

2005-07-28T21:38:00-04:00

"MochiKit makes JavaScript suck less." Gotta love an opening line like that, along with testing, documentation, cheap Python connectivity through JSON, and an open source license.

Via Ryan Shaw's del.icio.us linkblog, which is pretty damn entertaining.

NMH: Linkblogs in Feeds

2005-07-28T12:05:00-04:00

I'm noticing an upward trend in daily linkblog postings (probably aided and abetted by social bookmark services with decent APIs) in the feeds I read, and I'm really enjoying it. There's a high level of serendipity in an easy to read form factor.

On a related note, while aggregators bundle things together nicely, they also strip out the overwhelmingly horrific visual design plaguing websites today. Honestly, Angelfire has taken over the web.

As an experiment, take your top 5 favorite weblogs. Follow permalinks to a few archive posts and marvel at the amount of screen real estate occupied by non-content. As a mildly objective measure, navigate to the bottom of the archive page using the spacebar counting the number of chunks that contain absolutely nothing of the archived post.

End of rant, and yes I know where my petard and your hoist are.

NMH: Pardon the Interruption

2005-07-27T23:32:00-04:00

Your humble author now explains the break in posting after 54 consecutive days of commentary.

Got an airfare/lodging deal for four evenings on the isle of Grand Cayman at a hotel where you can walk out of the lobby onto a nice stretch of the 7 Mile Beach. Lots of laying on the beach reading (knocked out Moneyball, 1/3 of Quicksilver), sampling Pina Coladas, nighttime surf strolling, and visiting Stingray City. Carribean islands in the low season are nice because the locals aren't so harried and have plenty of time to chat. Also, the Cayman Islands are still crawling out from under Hurricane Ivan so they're really happy to see your dollar. Highly recommended!!

We now return you to your regularly scheduled techno media hackery.

Volodkin: The Hype Machine

2005-07-22T10:48:00-04:00

The Hype Machine is a watch engine that tracks MP3 file references in blog posts and presents them an easy to consume fashion. The system incorporates two spiffy technologies, NYU's experimental Content Distribution Network, Coral, and the open source XSPF Music Player.

Udell: Audio Linkblogging

2005-07-22T10:32:00-04:00

Last month, I postulated on "podbytes", sound bites for podcasts. Jon Udell has been pushing the envelope and has a spit and baling wire, proof of concept for audio linkblogging. There are so many moving parts, a.k.a web services, involved it's looking a little Rube Goldbergian, but it seems to work. Now if someone can smooth out the bumps (I'd say Odeo but they've got enough to do), that could be a lucrative service.

Geraci, Ray, Schimmel: Foundcity

2005-07-21T13:54:00-04:00

At Foundcity, del.icio.us tagging meets Google Maps. Mayhem ensues. Kewl.

Crosbie: Lessons of Lawrence

2005-07-21T13:51:00-04:00

Vin Crosbie recently fired off a deep, well considered e-mail to the Online News mailing list. The message was regarding what to learn from what Lawrence Journal-World has been doing to receive so many industry kudos. I was going to ask for permission to liberally quote from it, but Vin saved me the trouble and posted the e-mail to the Digital Deliverance blog.

The 5 second recap: develop long term visions and strategies at the top, unleash good energetic people on the ground to make it happen

Crosbie also notes six trends that news organizations really need to capture in their strategic thinking: multimedia, unlimited depth, on-demand, depackaging, individualization, mobility and ubiquity. These are consistent with his running theme that infrequent, mass delivery of uniform content bundles is not a winning proposition in the long run.

Reifman: CommonTimes API

2005-07-21T13:40:00-04:00

Link parkin': CommonTimes has an api. Jeff Reifman calls for mashups.

beep: Google ranking

2005-07-20T12:51:00-04:00

Don't look now, but beep, currently holds the #7 ranking for the word "beep" on Google.

On another note, Your Mom, a project researched, conceived, pitched, launched, edited, and now being reengineered for citizen's journalism, by Medill students, made the front page of The Washington Post.

At Medill students get real opportunities to turn the academic experience into industry impact.

Germain, Feeley, Monnier: Termite

2005-07-20T12:42:00-04:00

Strictly for PLDI wonks. Patrick Logan gives a capsule summary of Termite, a new Scheme based language for distributed computation.

Scheme macros + Erlang's concurrency + distributed continuations. Tasty!

Linden: Findory API

2005-07-20T12:35:00-04:00

Greg Linden spotlights Findory's API for searching their database of news articles and blog postings. REST in, RSS out, and you can even request personalized results.

PaidContent: Fox-MySpace

2005-07-19T18:28:00-04:00

I'm not into MySpace. Too old, not into pop music, etc. etc. But in a major development, Fox paid big bucks for MySpace's parent company. PaidContent.org has a great wrapup of the deal's details and implications. Those people do not sleep.

On a contra note, Danah Boyd connects the dots on the dissent commodification at work.

NeoPets, Flickr, Bloglines, del.icio.us, MySpace: if not a trend, I smell a trend story. The money's back jack.

de h

2005-07-19T14:42:00-04:00

Jython is an implementation of the Python programming language on top of the Java Virtual Machine. Since Jython runs on Java you could do things like stuff Python into applets or server side servlets. Think of it as ActionScript but more programmer oriented and without the all inclusive development environment of Macromedia Flash. Of course, applets haven't taken over the world but for small installations Jython based applets are eminently useful.

Unfortunately, Jython's language features had diverged from the ur-Python. Recently there's been a big effort to catch up, and Bill de h

Lasica: IBM's NPUC Conf.

2005-07-18T12:07:00-04:00

Since it was just down the highway for him, J. D. Lasica attended IBM's New Paradigms for Using Computing conference. This was a small, invite only confab led by Daniel Russell, with whom Lasica snagged a five minute video interview. The main focus was on ultra-portable devices and mobile computing applications.

One thing I noted was the dismissal of the laptop as a mobile computing device. I'll grant that laptops are mainly nomadic, but they are fast approaching the signature consumer computing device. Desktops are so last century, and cell phones are for talking unless you're a bleeding edge geek or business person. And the combination of laptop portability with large (enough) screen real estate makes them decent, if not great, sociable devices.

More and more I'm seeing a laptop, (or two!), being a central element in student study group huddles. You know the scene in which 3-4 students commandeer a large table in a cafe or the library and hunker down for a few hours, books and papers spread everywhere.

To make a long story short, there's probably a lot of mileage in researching and engineering laptop technologies for the forseeable future. In my book, they're essentially the briefcase of the new millenium.

SixApart: MT 3.2 Beta

2005-07-17T14:21:00-04:00

Even before finishing up the 32 Hot Features list, SixApart has unleashed the MovableType 3.2 Beta.

This probably isn't noteworthy to readers of this blog other than the hordes ;-/ of folks demanding comments. If I bite the bullet and rework NMH for MT 3.2, I'll give comments a shot. Warning though, you're dealing with a crusty old USENET type who used to read newsgroups (moment of silence) in Emacs.

Vinson: On Aggregation Spectrum

2005-07-17T14:14:00-04:00

Jack Vinson, follows up on my aggregator though exercise. He captures an issue for those of us who use aggregators for situational awareness (my definition): redundancy reduction.

For example, my Findory personalized feed picks up on items from feeds that I'm already subscribed to in Bloglines. Except that I'm already subscribed to them, so why do I need Findory to tell me about them? Having Findory keep track of that is too big a job, but my aggregator should be up to the task.

Memo to Jack. I'll buy next time at Mud.

Reifman, et. al.: CommonTimes

2005-07-17T14:01:00-04:00

Jeff Reifman, along with a small crew of volunteers and under-paid interns, recently launched CommonTimes.org. Capsule summary? CiteULike focused on news. Needs more mass but looks like it could be worth keeping an eye on. One neat little bit is the source stats breakdown in the left rail.

Interestingly, other than overall launch tone, I don't see anything that enforces so called "news" posting. Not that I'm advocating any such mechanisms, but an interesting study would be to look at a couple of tagging systems and see how much "topic drift" or abuse they receive. Define topic drift amongst yourselves.

The tagging concept is pretty much old hat. The big win so far has been in enabling social navigation. Next up, who can start to build really interesting analysis services on top of tagged content.

Hansson: Rails Movie

2005-07-16T17:36:00-04:00

Watching David Heinemeier Hansson's Ruby on Rails Movie, I was struck by a number of things as the tutorial proceeded, herewith braindumped for posterity.

Building a blogging application has become the "Hello, World!" of web application and content management systems. This includes all of the pejorative connotations. Next up, del.icio.us knockoffs as "Your Second Application!".

Dennis' Corollary to Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming, applies. However, the Rails community has gone the extra mile on design details and marketing, which is not to be scoffed at. And the emphasis on unit testing mitigates the "bug ridden" factor.

Screencasting would be a valuable tool to teach computer science students. Having project oriented classes is great in theory, but a downside is working through the iterations to train students up on presentation skills. Presuming either really accessible tools or reasonable training, screencasts could be a great way to time and place shift demos for busy faculty and TAs. They also are a concrete artifact that students could put in a "portfolio" to convince employers of presentation skill along with design proficiency.

Heck, if I were an employer, I might start asking for screencasts as a highpass filter.

NMH: #1 Media Hack

2005-07-16T15:23:00-04:00

Somehow I managed to get back to the #1 Google rank for media hack. We'll see how long that lasts.

Holovaty, et. al.: Django

2005-07-16T14:59:00-04:00

The web development and content management framework behind Lawrence Journal World's award winning sites is being open sourced as Django. Adrian Holovaty and Simon Willison were the primary developers. Python inside.

I was at the Chipy meeting Adrian wrote about, and can vouch that Django is pretty slick and intelligently designed.

Horowitz: Y! Research Berkeley

2005-07-15T11:17:00-04:00

Berkeley's getting another corporate funded, research lab. Marc Davis, of Garage Cinema fame, is starting up Yahoo! Research Berkeley, according to Bradley Horowitz. And he should know as Director of Technology Development at Y!. Here's betting you start to see some kickass, mobile and social media projects emerging from Yahoo! in the near future.

For those not into the academic research computing scene, there's a relatively recent trend where big computing companies create little knockoffs of Xerox PARC near computing research rich urban areas. Witness the Intel research Lablets, MSR in various places, and Google in Kirkland, WA. Heck, even locally Toyota has dropped a bunch of money on U of C to feed starving theorists. (I kid!)

As far as I can tell, none of them have had quite the synergistic energy and results the original PARC did, but dang if it ain't nice for the scholarly types who get hooked up with them. Depending on the arrangement, you get less teaching, more money, and access to a company's user base and infrastructure. Of course you're subject to the economic winds, you've got a bit more serious legal department, and there are fewer graduate serf...er...students.

Dyson: PostgreSQL + XML

2005-07-14T11:00:00-04:00

Link parkin': PostgreSQL 8.0 has some easily installed, serious XML processing functions, courtesy of Tom Dyson and John Gray.

AAAI: Analysing Weblogs CFP

2005-07-14T10:52:00-04:00

The American Association for Artificial Intelligence is holding a symposium on Computational Approaches to Analysing Weblogs (AAAI-CAAW) in March. Paper submissions are due October 7, 2005. Looks like a solid program committee and it's Palo Alto in March. Hmmmm....

Hat tip to Eszter's List.

Cringely: NerdTV

2005-07-13T11:18:00-04:00

I remember getting all excited about Robert X. Cringely talking about doing TV segments and distributing them on the Web. I thought I blogged it but apparently I didn't jot down my thoughts about how this could be a great experiment in P2P distribution (really!). Meanwhile, it mostly turned out to be vapor.

Well, it looks like Cringely's vision is coming true. You'll see a lot of links to the PBS press release, especially since the video is going to be Creative Commons licensed, but you can also get the dirt directly from Cringely.

Wyman: MSN Spaces Cruft

2005-07-12T12:32:00-04:00

Interesting post by PubSub's Bob Wyman on having to scrub certain links from MSN Spaces feeds. Those Microsoft RSS list extensions apparently wind up adding a lot of extra, but not timely links to RSS feeds. The arguably superfluous links, e.g. from blogrolls, will be excised from LinkRank calculations, but still forwarded on in PubSub search results.

This makes me wonder, aren't things like this better done with enclosures? This would have the benefit of keeping RSS relatively simple but also allowing for wider experimentation with other micro-formats. Having to worry about conflicting with various RSS factors has to be tough on extension implementors. Pushing the document out of band could relieve some pressure. Granted enclosures were intended for large media files, but there's no reason they couldn't be used for micro-format documents is there?

Pluck: Shadows

2005-07-11T12:44:00-04:00

Taggregation application++. Shadows is yet another tagging application. Unlike, David Carpe, who pans the initial unveiling as agitprop, to me it looks like there's about 1/2 a new idea in there. Gathering all the information, (tags, comments, and ratings) about a particular URL into a Shadow page is a new twist on tagging apps, at least to me.

But Carpe's right, it's a pretty crowded dance floor and a I don't see a lot of reason users would pick Shadows to boogie with.

Good: Personal Aggregators

2005-07-10T12:45:00-04:00

Robin Good has an in-depth review of BlogBridge, yet another entry in the crowded aggregator field. BlogBridge has some interesting features and philosophies, e.g. the hybrid Web/desktop strategy and focus on late adopting non-technical users. Obviously out of my demo, but I wish them good luck.

Meanwhile, in an extended interview with the developers of BlogBridge, Good gets to make some suggestions regarding the direction the product should go. He pushes on his idea of a Personal Media Aggregator, which has a lot of good ideas but suffers from a bit of feature creep IMHO. Also, a "walled self-contained communication structure" is a pipe dream these days, but maybe I'm reading this aspect incorrectly.

But as one who putters about thinking on aggregation, I'll have to dig into Good's missives a bit more.

Aside, BlogBridge is supposed to be GPLed, but how does that square with part of it being a Web hosted service?

Bicking: PHP Ghetto

2005-07-10T12:20:00-04:00

Ian, please stop holding back. Tell us how you really feel about PHP.

There's an old Scheme-head saying, roughly paraphrased, "If you're thinking about using eval you're probably doing something wrong." First of all eval is hard to use correctly, hard to debug, and usually presents major security issues. Seems like a lot of eval abuse has seeped into PHP, amongst other sins.

ALU: International Lisp Conference

2005-07-09T14:22:00-04:00

Wow! This year's International Lisp Conference put on by the Association of Lisp Users featured a stellar lineup. (What!? No David Moon?). The speakers page includes some slides from the plenary sessions and the technical talks.

Biggest surprise of all? Curl Corporation is still alive.

Calacanis: Blog Search Petition

2005-07-09T14:07:00-04:00

Not that I particularly care about the success of the petition, but Jason Calacanis is campaigning for Google and/or Yahoo! to implement blog focused search. This raises for me an interesting question.

Is blog/webfeed search now a Google-class problem?

I use Google-class generically for "large, technology company with ginormous computing facilities, technical expertise and financial resources." You could replace the name Google with a small number of other companies e.g. Microsoft, Yahoo!, maybe IBM or AskJeeves. The point being there might only be a small number of existing companies that could "solve" the major existing, problems and issues.

Of course I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that evidence of blog search at Yahoo! has cropped up in the wild.

Update: More details on the Technorati slowdown, courtesy of BusinessWeek's Stephen Baker.

NMH: Aggregation Control Spectrum

2005-07-08T09:33:00-04:00

A thought exercise.

At one end of a spectrum we have the classic webfeed aggregator. You tell it where to look, and it brings back a bunch of stuff. Whatever it finds, you get. The aggregator never changes where it looks.

At the other end of the spectrum, you have Findory. You don't tell it anything, explicitly, and it brings back a bunch of stuff. Depending on the profile of you that's built, you get different stuff from different places.

What would an aggregator somewhere in the middle look like?

WeatherBug: API

2005-07-08T09:14:00-04:00

If you wanted to fool around with Web based visualization and need a live data stream from lots of sources, the WeatherBug API might be up your alley. This could also be a nice foundation for scripting programming assignments. Not hard to motivate the application and you don't have to explain the concept of weather to students.

Hat tip to Jeff Barr who also had a good thought on APIs and SPIs, service provider interfaces.

Coyne, Lentczner, Horigan: ContextFree

2005-07-07T12:26:00-04:00

Mark Lentczner and John Horigan built ContextFree as an interactive environment for Chris Coyne's Context Free Design Grammar (CFDG) language. CFDG is a simple language for creating pretty pictures.

Just collecting these creatures to have an apiary of gentle slope, media oriented languages, ala processing.

MindValley Labs: blinklist

2005-07-07T12:14:00-04:00

Link parkin': blinklist.com, web based, tagged bookmarks app++.

Linden: MyWeb 2.0 Roundup

2005-07-06T09:57:00-04:00

Now that the frothing around Yahoo!'s MyWeb 2.0 has died down a bit, I can point to Greg Linden's roundup of pro and con voices as good one stop shopping to get a handle on what it means in the short term.

Allen: MT 3.2 On Horizon

2005-07-06T09:48:00-04:00

Despite my excursions into Drupal and WordPress, if you put a gun to my head and made me install a blog based, content management system I'd still go with Movable Type. Looks like there's a major MT revision forthcoming.

Jay Allen hints that there's over a 100 features and improvements. I'll be keeping an eye out for upgrades in a couple of areas: 1) groups and permissions, 2) finer grained control of entry ordering, sans extensions, 3) post metadata.

Still, MT to me has the best crafted underpinnings of all the blogging tools. The data model hits the sweet spot, and the Perl modules are finely honed. I haven't dug into the Php infrastructure, but I suspect it's just as nice, modulo my general misgivings regarding Php as a programming language.

pawful: Computed Art

2005-07-06T09:37:00-04:00

Stumbled across Poor Artists Working For a Living, I don't know how, but it's a trove of computational art hacks.

Pogue: EVDO in Range

2005-07-05T09:59:00-04:00

A little stale, but in the NY Times, David Pogue gives Verizon's EV-DO a positive review for early adopters. I'm in the market for a new cell phone+service and can't decide if I want to go aggro-geek and get something fully kitted out with a top of the line data service, or stay cheap and use the bucks for something else.

Tempting, very tempting.

Angeles: Enterprise Social Bookmarking

2005-07-05T09:51:00-04:00

Link parkin': Michael Angeles' case study of integrating a social bookmarking service into a work environment.

Jones: Python workqueue

2005-07-05T09:46:00-04:00

As Evan Jones points out, the threadpool is a common tool for concurrent and parallel tasks. For Python, I've been using the solid, but long in the tooth, Xoltar toolkit. I'm putting Jones' workqueue module in my backpocket since it's of recent vintage.

Orchard: Feed Foundation

2005-07-04T10:47:00-04:00

L. M. Orchard braindumped his thinking on building a foundation for webfeed driven applications. The key things that come out are 1) feed crawling, 2) archiving data model + querying, and 3) client API. He focuses on the second point and similar to work I did with Jeff Cousens, an MS student, comes down on the side of a light mix of metadata in the traditional relational model, and stashing the raw data. As Jeff showed, this can scale to some pretty large feed collections on stock hardware.

Well, if you consider 1 TB disk stock hardware ;-/ which isnt' that farfetched. However, the key is to store as much raw data as possible. If you get your data model wrong you can always go back and reprocess it.

Scriven: Python DB SynSugar

2005-07-04T10:33:00-04:00

Nice article by Scott Scriven on using Python's syntactic overloading features to make RDBMS access simpler and cleaner. Of course this depends on your data model, but once you've got that straight most of the techniques Scriven presents are readily applicable. Highly useful for Web development in Python.

Torkington: Stone & Attention

2005-07-04T10:25:00-04:00

Linda Stone, former Microsoft social computing researcher, coined the term "continuous partial attention" and spoke at Supernova 2005. Nat Torkington took notes which have been widely linked. The gist is, as far as I can manage, that folks have electronically networked themselves to death, attention wise, fragmenting a scarce resource across too many connections. Next up, there will be a huge premium on committed attention through a small set of trusted connections.

As an aside, practically any work related meeting I attend, with more than three people, has an abundance of overequipped powerusers not paying focused attention. Faculty meetings, classes, academic conferences, you name it. I'm wondering when this reaches the point where committed engagement becomes a competitive advantage.

Boyd: On MyWeb 2.0

2005-07-03T12:08:00-04:00

Stowe Boyd gets a little excited about Yahoo!'s MyWeb 2.0 and makes an interesting connection:

I continue to believe that the center of the social universe is the instant messaging buddy list metaphor: not just because I am biased toward real-time communication, but because human beings are the center of the socialized world.

The tie between social connections and buddy lists is great, the rest I think is a false dichotomy. I agree that tools for managing social boundaries, of which buddy lists are an important example, should be prominent in socially oriented apps. They're not the center of the world though, as the actual activity and media that connect people are what's really important. However, there's no reason a well designed app can't keep help users manage both aspects.

In most of these systems, there's "stuff" and "people". Both are important to end users.

But tools like buddy lists are sorely undervalued in many web applications. Witness the constant requests for private bookmarks in del.icio.us. Meanwhile, I admire Flickr's lightweight, but apparently effective, tools for managing social connections.

Jennings: Playlist Sharing

2005-07-02T12:15:00-04:00

David Jennings does some comparing and contrasting of playlist sharing services. Not sure anything definitive comes out of it other than, Art of the Mix and WebJay are distinctly different. Still it's useful for reference purposes.

Sessum: Dear Technorati

2005-07-01T12:05:00-04:00

I've been trying to lay off slagging on their service, but the case against Technorati, as Jeneane Sessum points out, is building. I never quite understood the attraction since Technorati search results are typically unintelligible to me and the number of compelling apps that rely on Technorati's services is vanishingly small.

I'll have to see how Feedster, WayPath, Blogdigger, et. al. are doing these days, but despite obvious appearances there's probably still market opportunities in webfeed oriented information retrieval services.

Meyers: Py4Fun

2005-07-01T11:47:00-04:00

Python For Fun is a collection of Python code for intermediate programmers, people who already have a handle on the basics of programming but aren't quite hacker grade or ace with Python. Chris Meyers' has put together a bundle of interesting starting points and kernels for exploration. There's components on plain old data structures, GUI programming, RDBMS manipulation, circuit logic, virtual machines and compilation. Best of all there are suggestions for further directions to take each module, essentialy providing a nice toolkit of potential programming assignments for the enterprising Python instructor.

Google, Y!: API Fu

2005-06-30T11:55:00-04:00

As if developers didn't have enough catnip to occupy themselves with, Google Maps now as an API. As well Yahoo! Maps now has programmatic services.

And digging into yesterday's MyWeb announcement, Yahoo!'s also providing an API for that as well. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like there's any way to actually put data into a user's folders though.

Yahoo!: MyWeb 2.0

2005-06-29T11:58:00-04:00

Yowsa! Looks like Yahoo! is going! gangbusters! into social! software!, putting Google and MS (other than Wallop) on the defensive. Yahoo! 360 went non-invite recently and now there's MyWeb 2.0. The new MyWeb looks like a del.icio.us knockoff but leveraging and integrating existing Yahoo! features like group management and search.

And to my eyes Yahoo! is just about this far from putting together an innovative social content media aggregator that puts a hurt on the rest of the market. They've got all the pieces (Flickr, YTunes, MyYahoo, MyWeb, 360, a directory, and search), the smart dev talent, and the commercial motivation.

Hat tip to John Battelle.

Hwang: del.icio.us director

2005-06-28T11:48:00-04:00

Johnvey Hwang's del.icio.us director is a tour-de-force of web service and AJAX programming. The result is a cleanly designed interface for the del.icio.us power user.

However, this inudced the notion that AJAX just means Flash, except with stone age development tools, implemented slightly differently across the major browsers, and a retrograde user interface API? But look ma! No propietary plug-ins!

It's so broken it just might work.

FirstGov: Free Graphics

2005-06-28T11:36:00-04:00

Always collecting links to big piles of free media here at NMH. Our own federal government, at FirstGov.gov, has anted up, gathering links to lots of government run, public domain image sites. I mean where else could you find copyright free photos taken by W.E.B. Dubois while he was hanging out in Paris?!

Sharkey: Suck History

2005-06-27T11:00:00-04:00

I admit it. I was and always will be a Suck fanboy. I even bought the damn book! Those detestable forays into "really X invented Y" (e.g. Lou Reed really invented rapping)? Here comes one.

Suck really invented blogging. Not the technology per se but the attitude, many of the literary conventions, and the current reigning visual design ethos. Routinely updated? Yup. Oblique use of links as both citation and commentary? Yup. Snarky, personal point of view? Yup. Web friendly writing style? Yup. No subject out of bounds? Yup. 3 column layout, with thin content column? Yup. Unique link for each days content? Yup.

Suck wasn't a "blog" but it definitely was "blogging".

Don't believe me? Revisit some old classics like Dig We Must, News above the Title, and just about anything by Ann O' Tate.

For a recap in broadband, dive into Matt Sharkey's history of Suck, entitled "The Big Fish" which conveniently concides with the upcoming tenth anniversary of Suck's first post.

AFI: Top 100 Quotes

2005-06-26T12:44:00-04:00

Apropos of nothing, I normally detest list making of the sort embodied by the American Film Institute's Top 100 Movie Quotes. Such lists have the dubious distinction of generating more heat than light, IMHO.

For whatever reason, this one caught my fancy, and it's hard to argue with most of the selections (another reason I don't like such lists). Moonstruck's "Snap out of it!" seems highly dubious to me though, along with LOTR's "My Precious". Sorry, the books did the heavy lifting on that one. Animal House got short shrift. I'd bump "Toga..." for "Fat, drunk, and stupid...", and "Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor...". And from Apocalypse Now how can you leave out "Terminate... with extreme prejudice."?!

Bourriaud: Semionauts

2005-06-26T12:13:00-04:00

Pursuant to my commentary about navigating the long tail, Ryan Shaw of Berkeley's SIMS program pointed me towards a term, semionaut, coined by artist Nicolas Bourriaud. One of Bourriaud's claims to fame is the late 90's text, "Relational Aesthetics," where semionaut came from. Emerging from the art world, "Relational Aesthetics" is probably over my head, but I'm game to dig up a copy and see if I can get the full import of Bourriaud's commentary.

Interestingly, it's difficult to find a review or two of the book, despite what appears to be some fairly broad impact. An in-depth review in the London Review of Books, by Princeton professor Hal Foster, is behind a pay wall.

"Postproduction" also looks interesting.

Thanks Ryan!

Gregorio: Python Sparklines

2005-06-25T23:18:00-04:00

Link parkin': I haven't had time to read it all the way through, but in his continuing series on how to actually build REST services, Joe Gregorio detours into generating sparklines RESTfully

NMH: The Big Four Oh

2005-06-25T23:09:00-04:00

No I am not 40, although I'm getting close. But apparently there are now over 40 Bloglines subscribers to this site. Yowsa!! And that's to the full content feed, so there may be a few others lurking out there, using the older summary feeds.

You keep reading, we'll keep posting. Actually, I'll keep posting anyway to augment my faulty memory, but thanks for the attention.

Fowks: Flickr Montager

2005-06-25T23:01:00-04:00

Billy Fowks Flickr Montager is one of the first applications of the Flickr API that actually constructs new media artifacts. I was initially impressed by the types of montages it created (there must be a relatively obvious algorithm somewhere for using images as pixels for other images), but even cooler is that the montage is actually a navigation device unto itself. Muy bueno!

Obasanjo: MS RSS Announcement

2005-06-25T22:50:00-04:00

MicroSoft had some "big" announcements about RSS at Gnomedex, which Dare Obasanjo covered in exquisite detail.

I put big in scarequotes because I can really only detect four things coming out of this:

Lots of enthusiasm from MS about RSS
Internet Explorer becomes something of an RSS reader
Longhorn gets an RSS library
Extensions to RSS 2.0 to better represent lists

Points 2 and 4 to arrive within an Internet age or so.

I might be worried about incompatible and propietary RSS extensions except RSS has such a simple data model and previous generators were often so crappy that consumers have been through this drill already. MS is just one more whizzer in the water.

Otherwise, yawn.

Lundh: Widget Construction Kit

2005-06-24T17:55:00-04:00

Don't know how I missed it, but Fredrik Lundh has been developing an extension framework for Python's built-in Tk based GUI toolkit. His module is named the Widget Construction Kit (WCK), and recently part of WCK's drawing mechanism has been implemented using aggdraw. In turn AGG is a high quality vector graphics library. Since Lundh is involved, WCK I'd bet the Python Imaging Library plays nicely as well.

The gist? Python is fast gaining an easily extensible, high quality, cross platform, interface toolkit. You don't just get a bunch of early 90's era widgets, but a framework for developing whizzy new interface elements. In Python no less!!

Ogbuji: Python & Unicode

2005-06-23T12:31:00-04:00

As Joel Spolsky points out, every programmer should have a basic understanding of character sets. Of course one key factor is knowing how your language(s) deals with character sets. For Python, Uche Ogbuji has a nice collection of Python and UNICODE wisdom and nuggets.

And trust me, anyone who claims to be seriously developing webfeed apps and Web 2.0 more generally, needs to know a bit about UNICODE.

Menchen: del.icio.us behavior

2005-06-23T12:22:00-04:00

Ericka Menchen, University of Illinois, Chicago communications graduate student, recently conducted a survey of del.icio.us users. The results, entitled "Feedback, Motivation and Collectivity in a Social Bookmarking System" are now available.

Ericka also maintains an outstanding blog, regarding her adventures in graduate school.

Brown: Heads News/21st

2005-06-22T18:33:00-04:00

Merrill Brown, former MSNBC top honcho, has been tapped to head up the Carnegie Foundation's, News in the 21st Century project, one element of Carnegie's overall program on revitalizing journalism. Fabulous!

At the risk of biting the hand that feeds me, when the original Carnegie announcement was made, I was struck by how little the issue of changing audience behavior, aided and abetted by technology, was a component. It read to me as revitalization through creating folks who are really, really good at reporting as opposed to just really good at reporting. Readers are just twiddling their thumbs waiting for more better investigative reporting!!

Maybe with his background and credibility, Brown will be able to give a little push in the audience facing direction.

Torkington: Filtering the Long Tail

2005-06-21T18:33:00-04:00

O'Reillys, Nat Torkington transcribed some of the Long Tail Panel at Supernova 2005. The thoughts were interesting (a rock radio station dies everyday), but it tweaked one of my not quite pet peeves.

Long tail disciples almost uniformly refer to the need for tools to "filter" extraordinary amounts of niche content. A better analogy is probably "navigation", avoiding the term search as search is highly conflated with information retrieval techniques. My guess is that if you look at how people deal actually deal with long tail ecologies (e.g. electronica DJs, comic book collectors, etc.) they navigate social networks surrounding and embedding the niche media.

If you look at Amazon, I would bet that the "People who bought...", Listmania, and review features work a lot better than the recommendation engine in terms of encouraging sales. These could only loosely be construed as filtering.

Instead of filtering tools, how about "expansion" tools? Tools that work from a kernel of known preferential content, and expand the horizon outward. You don't need to sell folks on the entirety of the long tail at once.

plasq: Comic Life

2005-06-21T00:03:00-04:00

Link parkin:' plasq's Comic Life looks like an elegant tool for people to author new media objects out of those pile of digital photos they have lying around.

IonZoft: TagCloud.com

2005-06-20T23:45:00-04:00

TagCloud is a meta-webfeed service that takes bundles of webfeeds and gives back weighted lists of frequently occurring terms. Unclear on how the chosen terms are selected and what the time window is for analysis, but it's a well done first cut.

NMH: PodBytes

2005-06-19T13:31:00-04:00

Disclaimer, I don't listen to podcasts and I'm only peripherally interested in them as another form of sociable media on the Web. This post was inspired by some observations by Ernest Miller on the scannability of podcasts.

Linkblogging is the equivalent of television soundbites for the Web. An exclusive diet of soundbites is obviously not good, but they do serve a useful purpose when done well, transmitting useful information in a condensed fashion. It's when they get completely divorced from their original context that soundbites get dangerous.

Mechanisms to support what I'm terming podbytes (probably too cute by half but hang with me), could help amplify the impact of podcasts. If users had a cheap and easy way to select, snip, and link to chunks of podcasts a.ka. podbytes, serious podcast listeners could more easily spread the word about the highlights of good podcasts. Less hardcore users could ride the collective intelligence of the core podcast audiences by keeping track of podbyte blogs (podbyting?) through webfeeds or WebJay playlists. This would probably be a much more effective means of scanning than having to play the podcast at double time. Podbytes would also make podcasts much more of the Web than they are now.

There are two thorny issues as I see it. One, is convenient interfaces for selecting and snipping podbytes. On the desktop, I don't see this as insurmountable, but on other podcast listening devices such as iPods, there'd need to be careful physical design. I'm not holding my breath waiting for a soundbite marking mechanism to come to these devices. Plus, who needs to be podbyting when they're driving or running on the treadmill!

Two, linking into regions of MP3s, the common podcast file format as far as I know, isn't particularly natural. Jon Udell has been exploring many of these issues, but as recently as January of this year, linking to podcast samples wasn't peachy and I haven't heard anything to change that picture.

NMH: Item DB Design

2005-06-18T14:36:00-04:00

About a week ago I got a note from Jury Gerasimov, a developer on Surfpack. Gerasimov was excited by my wistful dreams of an "aggregator as platform". Aparently Surfpack is aiming to fit that bill.

There are two elements that I think are crucial for extensiblity, and missing in just about every aggregator. One is the ability to hook into the fetching/crawling mechanism. Inside every aggregator is a little personal Web crawler. As far as I know, no aggregator makes it easy to monitor and extend what that crawler does.

Second, once the crawler has done it's work retrieving all of that web content on the user's behalf, presuming the aggregator persistently stores what it finds, you'd like to have a nice interface for interrogating that data. A little feed item specific query and manipulation language would be my ideal, but then again I'm a geek. Along with an extensible user interface this is one of the key aspects of "aggregator as platform".

Again, making an analogy to Emacs, text navigation, querying, region marking, etc. are fabulously well supported in Emacs lisp. What would be the appropriate language mechanisms for working with a database of webfeed items?

Halavais: Beyond Emergence

2005-06-17T23:18:00-04:00

Meaty. Alex Halavais makes a case for social informatics growing up as a field, a.k.a. getting beyond emergence.

Still pondering but looks challenging to say the least.

Flick & FeedBurner: API Fu

2005-06-16T21:48:00-04:00

Nothing collaborative going here, just coincidence. Flickr has revamped their API a bit to deal with 3rd party Flickr apps needing authentication. In essence, Flickr will hand out time limited tokens to the app instead of the app asking for user's login/password combo.

Meanwhile, FeedBurner has launched an Awareness API. FeedBurner provides a level of indirection on webfeeds, which allows them to do readership calculations among other things. You proxy delivery of your webfeed and they give you interesting stats. The Awareness API lets folks get at their data through web services, so further applications can be developed.

My guess is that for any individual feed this is pretty boring, but for decentralized networks of sites this could be pretty important. FeedBurner could turn into the Audit Bureau of Circulations for webfeeds! Of course ABC is a relatively transparent non-profit and FeedBurner is a privately held company so there's a bit of a difference.

Xanthakis: pyc

2005-06-15T23:18:00-04:00

pyc is a full blown compiler from Python source to Python VM bytecode, written by Stelios Xanthakis. Yet another vehicle for doing interesting programming language design, implementation, and pedagogy.

Now here's a whacky idea, taking off from Andrew Appel's compiler text, Modern Compiler Implementation in Python.

WAN: 100 Largest Newspapers

2005-06-15T22:04:00-04:00

Link parkin': The World Association of Newspapers' 100 largest newspapers by circulation. All I've got to say is that there are hell of a lot of papers being sold in Japan.

NMH: AudioScrobbler Irritation

2005-06-14T23:31:00-04:00

One mild irritant with AudioScrobbler is that you can't seem to get your listening history data out in any reasonable way. This is mitigated by the fact that you could write a custom plugin to record the information in your own local data store, or configure a prebuilt plug-in to go through a proxy that does the archiving.

Hmmm, I wonder if you could build a fully distributed P2P version of AudioScrobbler with easy to manage social boundaries, backed by good security and privacy, nice global statistical services and a well designed query interface?

I can dream can't I!

Schachter: DIU Magic Tags

2005-06-13T23:56:00-04:00

del.icio.us now has gotten a bit smarter about media types. URLs ending in particular extensions automatically get tagged with a few special labels. For example, .mp3 will automatically be labeled system:filetype:mp3 and system:media:audio. Apparently you can also use these special labels yourself on any old URL.

Bonus podcasting boosting effect. Any RSS feeds that include one of these magic tags become enclosure containing. I'd have to work through the math, but I think with some creative tagging this can be an instant podcast creation tool, presuming of course all the media is already on the Web.

Engestr

2005-06-12T21:19:00-04:00

Recently, I've taken to characterizing my research interests as being centered on sociable media on the Web, especially from an empirical perspective. Jyri Engestr

Hanneman & Riddle: Intro SNA

2005-06-11T18:16:00-04:00

If you don't want to shell out the cash for John Scott's "Social Network Analysis: A Handbook", a quick scan of Hanneman & Riddle's "Introduction to social network methods" seems to indicate the free, open, and online text might be a reasonable substitute.

NMH: Apple, Intel, Blog Research

2005-06-11T18:04:00-04:00

Thinking differently, the Apple on Intel announcement could serve as a benchmark of sorts for blog analysis tools. Anything that purports to provide insight into what's being written or discussed in the blogosphere, and Web in general, should be able to do some retrospective analysis on the timeframe from June 1 to June 10 or so, and determine whether they're doing better than random.

Yuill: SVS

2005-06-10T23:13:00-04:00

SVS, or Social Versioning System, is Simon Yuill's neat take on version control and collaborative development. I haven't quite figured out exactly what SVS is, but it looks like a toolkit for building collaborative development tools.

Even cooler, SVS is being put to use for the development of spring_alpha, a networked game designed to explore development and experimentation with social practices, in both software production and game design. One of my (many!) rejected NSF grant proposals essentially had these concepts as the kernel of a research program. But the software in the proposal was a bit vaporous. I'll have to keep svs/spring_alpha in the back pocket for future attempts.

Oh yeah, Python inside!!

King & Sanders: FeedLounge

2005-06-09T22:17:00-04:00

Aggregator++. Getting a bit crowded in the marketplace I'd say. For Alex King and Scott Sander's FeedLounge it looks like a nice UI and tagging (feeds and posts), from the ground up, will be the claims to fame.

CHS: 1909 Plan Of Chicago

2005-06-08T18:13:00-04:00

Name in lights moment. The culmination of 2 course instantiations and a summer's worth of work went live about a month ago. Carl Smith did the heavy lifting on our Interpretive Digital Essay on The 1909 Plan of Chicago, (scroll down for credits) but I'm glad to have done my small part to make it happen. At the very least, our co-taught class helped wrangle research assistant talent for that big summer push!

If you really want to know about the birth of modern Chicago, dig in. Besides the interactive features are just dang cool!!

Zorn: On Alicia Frantz

2005-06-07T22:07:00-04:00

Eric Zorn, of The Chicago Tribune, wrote a moving column regarding Alicia Frantz, a local woman who passed away when she fell off her bike and was hit by a truck. Pure chance.

So what's the big deal? Zorn also maintains a Tribune branded weblog and in connection with his column he also wrote a moving post commemorating Frantz's life. I never met Frantz and I don't think Zorn did either, but as part of the Chicago area blogging community he demonstrates that he "gets it" by including amateur pictures of her, referencing her audio work, linking to her site, and pointing to other places to get more of Alicia's story, highlighting her place within the blogging community. I'm sure The Trib is picking up quite a few reads on its site and major whuffie with Chicagoland bloggers.

This is what I was talking about before when I said newspapers might be better off achieving A-List blogger status. Just actively listening and fully participating can go a long way.

Mr. Blentwell: Blentwell.org

2005-06-06T22:28:00-04:00

Blentwell is del.icio.us for mix-DJ's. Where have you been all of my life!?

Sniff, it's just so beautiful. Can a brother get a tissue?

Cassimally: Diggin beep

2005-06-05T12:18:00-04:00

Digging through the logs for beep I ran across at least one satisfied customer. At 16 years of age, K. C. Cassimally might be a bit below the targeted demographic but the enthusiasm for the project is encouraging.

And it's always neat to get shout outs from Mauritius!!

PubSub: GovSub

2005-06-04T13:25:00-04:00

PubSub is now in the business of creating specialized searches on various aspects of government. Seeing the web's political reactions in realtime will be a major impact of large scale watch engines.

Hobbs: C Overflow

2005-06-04T13:10:00-04:00

Link parkin': Darren Hobbs notes a major scientific project almost losing 5 years of work due to range limits in C integers. There's one for the CS 213 anecdote book.

Crosbie: Stark Numbers

2005-06-04T13:06:00-04:00

One of the reasons I generally like Vin Crosbie's writings on the media industry is he usually has nicely contextualized statistics to back up his thoughts. Witness the fact that if you look at the raw numbers of newspaper circulation declines, you start to see whole towns disappearing. Extrapolate to major metro areas and there are significant communities (Anaheim, Syracuse, Fort Lauderdale) conceptually going by the wayside. Definitely a different perspective than 1% circulation drop which is my quick estimate of the lossage from Vin's numbers.

If daily news trends at these circulation scales continue on their current harrowing trend, citizens journalism might not just be an alternative, but the only option.

NMH: Sociable Lifestyle Aggregator

2005-06-03T21:04:00-04:00

Over a year ago, Marc Canter planted his flag on the term "digital lifestyle aggregation" or DLA. When I first heard of DLA, the concept rang a bit hollow but thinking about del.icio.us, Flickr, allconsuming, and audioscrobbler, the pieces are there. All of these applications generate webfeeds so they could be slurped into your generic RSS aggregator, but I think most of these are subtly incorrect, and point to where I'd tweak DLA.

What we really want is Sociable Lifestyle Aggregators for doing DLA. Not only do we want to monitor and aggregate our personal digital lifestyles, we want to have good mechanisms for selective and controlled revelation. Aggregators with buddy lists could be a baby step, but aggregators equally or priimarily designed for social activities are a whole different beast. The issues are a little deeper than "river of news" versus "e-mail".

Fish: Voiding Content

2005-06-03T20:48:00-04:00

Regardless of what you think of Stanley Fish as an intellectual, academic, educator, or adminstrator, this New York Times op-ed piece on designing new languages should resonate with anyone who calls themselves a computer scientist.

If you could get the infrastructure right, Fish's exercise would be fun to pull on a bunch of unsuspecting super neophyte programmers. Students who didn't know enough to "know" that designing a language is supposed to be hard. Combine with Stroustrup's maxim "library design is language design" for maximum effect.

MOVES: Delta32

2005-06-02T22:11:00-04:00

I have no idea what MOVES stands for, but it's an organization connected with the Naval Postgraduate Institute. Apparently MOVES is the driving force behind Delta3D, an open source game engine with the backing of the US military for development support. Runs Windows or Linux.

Python inside(able): wOOt!

Rogers: Why Y! Music Engine

2005-06-02T22:03:00-04:00

I've mentioned before that I thought the Yahoo! Music Engine looks cool simply because it's pluggable. Although a bit stale, when yTunes shipped, Ian Rogers posted an entertaining overview of why adopting the Yahoo! Music Engine might be worth your while.

COMMAND LINE SHELL PLUGIN make me drool!

Werdmuller, et. al: Elgg

2005-06-01T23:35:00-04:00

Link parkin: Elgg is an open source "personal learning landscape", a.k.a. a social blogging and media tool. Might be worth digging into.

NMH: Citizen's Journalism, Feh

2005-05-31T22:33:00-04:00

Speaking of journalists vs bloggers, I'm coming to a somewhat contrarian position regarding traditional news organizations and citizen journalists. The old organizations should run away from hosting citizen's content like the plague. Comments, blogs, photos? Don't bother. Everyone can have their own press, why let them use yours.

Instead, these organizations should become the A1 A-list blogger of the community. Set up a continuous web beat desk. Staff a small number of folks to aggregate and point to the best web material of your community. Use your reporting skills, acumen, and connections to provide raw material for the audience, e.g. put in the time to make public records information more usable, or have the web desk work on providing on-line back story material from reporters.

Don't bother herding cats. Make them chase your tail. Be the first place locals want a link from, and the first place they link to.

Shachtman: Drone Attack

2005-05-31T22:15:00-04:00

Once an avowed Wired hater, I've taken a shine to the recent vintage. The magazine's not so heavy on The Long Now boosterism, although some might argue its just been replaced by The Long Tail boosterism. In any event, I took a particular liking to Noah Shachtman's article on unmanned aviation in the military. Enough to attempt a tortured analogy.

Shachtman's piece captures a cultural divide between the Air Force, which views UAVs as planes requiring professional operation, and the Army which treats these devices as populist tools for more effective tactical ops. Both sides of the divide are rapidly adopting the technology, and adapting their cultures but in different means and ways, each choosing different shapings of the tools.

Lesson learned? Not either/or but and.

I'm not big on the journalism vs blogging debate, but could a similar thing be happening with blogging packages and other social media tools? The pros are cautiously figuring out how to integrate and adapt, while the grunts are charging forward. Out of both efforts will come a variety of adapted tools, molded appropriately for their particular strategic and social contexts.

I told you it was a tortured analogy!

Speroni: Tags, Clouds vs Sets

2005-05-30T19:56:00-04:00

I'm not dead yet.

Pietro Speroni has written a long piece on the difference between tag sets and tag clouds. The former is just a list of labels applied to an item (e.g. url), the latter is the same list with label frequency factored in. Tag clouds essentially carry more information. Speroni also speculates on the rank/frequency distribution in del.icio.us tag clouds, invoking power law distributions, but at least retaining some skepticism that they really behave that way.

The interesting leap is that tag clouds can be considered feature vectors, which are subsequently amenable to well known clustering and information retrieveal techniques. I'm not sure sets versus clouds actually make that much of a difference. I'd have to do the math, but if you assume something approaching a power law distribution, almost all of the information is in the first couple of labels anyway. The rest will be sufficiently non-discriminating that a good clustering algorithm will ignore them anyway.

Based upon these thoughts, Terrell Russell has cooked up a charting engine to see tag set behavior for del.icio.us URLs. However, it strikes me that some kind of rigorous study is in order.

James: Outfoxed

2005-05-14T12:56:00-04:00

Stan James' Outfoxed is a Firefox extension to support rating pages and distributing the metadata across social networks. James built Outfoxed in less than six months, as part of a Masters' thesis, and the site has a detailed narration of the system's design, implementation, and consequences.

I'm not a huge fan of explicit rating systems, but Outfoxed is a good case study of how to build new functionality directly into an extensible browser.

Hey, isn't about time for someone to start a new commercial effort around Firefox to make it "safe for business"? Do some heavy duty engineering to make the browser much more efficient (memory consumption is ridiculous), provide some cleaned up well maintained groupware extensions, tie the whole bundle into readily available backend systems (Exchange, wiki & weblog tools, del.icio.us clone), and call it a low end Groove. Might be worth somebody's effort.

Flickr: DHTML Viewer

2005-05-14T12:45:00-04:00

Flickr is ditching Flash and going to DHTML for displaying photos in many places. Can't find any details anywhere, but apparently this new scheme also supports active links in notes on photos. Gustavo G has an example photo with embedded links.

The photo mesh is slowly creeping up on us.

NMH: #2 Media Hack

2005-05-13T10:07:00-04:00

It was only a matter of time, but this little blog that could, finally succumbed to Adam Penenberg's, Media Hack column in the Google rankings. Could be my general lack of posting activity, but I'm guessing Penenberg's work fact checking Michelle Delio garnered a number of high quality links.

Sniff

Still the number one New Media Hack though.

Pilgrim: Dive into Greasemonkey

2005-05-13T10:01:00-04:00

Detailed instructions on how to trick out Firefox using the Greasemonkey extension. From Mark Pilgrim. Nuff said.

Yahoo!: Y! Music Engine

2005-05-13T09:57:00-04:00

Dubbed yTunes, Yahoo! has released Yahoo! Music Engine, a desktop digital media application in competion with iTunes, Winamp, Windows Media Player, et. al. Being something of a duffer in writing plug-ins for such players, the first thing that lept to mind was "is it extensible?".

Sho nuff, you can write plug-ins for yTunes.

Medill: Beep

2005-05-13T09:51:00-04:00

Yeah, I'm still alive. One of the things sucking up my time has been beep, a joint project between Medill's Media Managment capstone project and Chicago's suburban Daily Herald newspaper. Rich Gordon gives better background over at E-Media Tidbits.

Working on this project served as a nice, real world introduction to Drupal. I've mentioned before that Drupal is a next step blogging tool. Actually, the built in blogging module is quite marginal from my perspective, especially in comparison to something like Movable Type. Example, getting a solid multi-user blog is fairly painful. (Yes, I know about taxonomies, but that's not the built-in blogging module now is it?)

HOWEVER! Drupal has a very nice extension framework. The system supports the creation of conceptually new types of content much better than Movable Type. And the ability to escape hatch and create nodes of Php code is huge, especially since such pages will automatically be integrated with the rest of Drupal's permission, logging, theming, etc. mechanisms. Theming and URL management is also well done in Drupal.

In short, I think Drupal is a great tool for breaking out of the blog model and thinking more of microcontent creation.

NMH: Retrospection Fu

2005-05-02T23:45:00-04:00

Two days ago, I posted about unalog. Guess who posted about unalog way back in August of 2004? Yours truly, but since I'm editing in a browser, there's not much of an automated help option out there. Even worse, I had much more context in the first post.

What would it take to ameliorate this problem? Writing tools tied to retrospection tools. Jeff Jarvis likes to chirp about news being fishwrap, so free the archives. But as Steven Berling Johnson points out, good tools make archives quite valuable.

And I still want a nickel for every time the Memex is invoked.

NMH: Source Management

2005-05-02T23:39:00-04:00

Thought parkin': No not source code management, aggregator source management. In any news aggregator, the management of sources is just as important as the management of the received items, maybe even moreso. Most webfeed aggregators make you manage them explicitly, but tools like Findory completely manage the sources for you, behind the scenes.

Wonder what the spaces inbetween these design end points looks like?

O'Reilly: Pre-historic Web Advertising

2005-05-02T23:30:00-04:00

Tim O'Reilly documents O'Reilly and Associates early efforts pioneering advertising on the Web. This is mainly for anecdotal amusement, however it reminds that I'm so old that once upon a time I was actually highly infatuated with GNNPress. GNNPress was like FrontPage except earlier and better, and essentially dead before blogging even got started. The tool get swallowed up when AOL bought GNN and consequently got GNNPress and GNNServer, which PhilG road to glory as AOLServer.

Man I'm old!

Shirky, et. al: You're It

2005-04-30T18:50:00-04:00

Clay Shirky launches a new group blog, You're It focusing on tagging, taxonomy, and folksonomy. Not sure there's much there to cover though.

Campbell: Scuttle

2005-04-30T18:46:00-04:00

Probably time to start a Wiki page collecting tagged bookmark applications, so I can include Marcus Campbell's scuttle. Open source, based upon Php and MySQL.

NMH: Social Navigation + Group Boundaries

2005-04-29T23:20:00-04:00

Thought parkin': I wonder if anyone within the HCI community in general and the social navigation subfield in particular, has looked closely at mechanisms for group, permission, and capabilities management. I get the sense that Flickr get's a lot of mileage out of a relatively simple system, but I'm trying to envision the extension to socialized aggregators.

Given that you want to expose portions of your reading behavior to different communities what are decent mechanisms for expressing one's intent? Throwaway approach: start with buddylists and go from there.

Chudnov: Unalog

2005-04-29T22:59:00-04:00

Speaking of open source del.icio.us knockoffs, David Chudnov's unalog looks mighty useful. Python, Quixote, and ZODB inside to boot.

Luk: FreeTag

2005-04-29T22:49:00-04:00

Since Joshua, rightly so, doesn't let the source code of del.icio.us out and about, others wanting to implement tagging need to look elsewhere. Gordon Luk's FreeTag is a combo package of Php and MySQL code providing an API and schema for tagging. Don't know if it will scale to the levels of DIU, but it's a start.

Ad hoc tagging strikes me as one of those bits of functionality that has many obviously easy, yet monstrously broken implementations. Sort of like user, group, and permission management capabilities. The more open examples that are out there the better chance developers have of converging on a decent range of techniques.

Garfunkel: Civilities

2005-04-28T21:23:00-04:00

I enjoyed my first tasting of Jon Garfunkel's Civilities. I like the measured criticism approach, and Civilities has a distinctive visual design (Drupal inside). Might seem a bit formal in tone given today's web writing, but there's good critical thinking in there. I always wondered what happened to Elwyn Jenkins.

Hat tip to Seth Finkelstein

Hyde: Fear the Monkey

2005-04-27T23:28:00-04:00

No not the fist but the grease.

Last July, I foresaw a thousand client side page hacks blooming. This was motivated by Adrian Holovaty writing a Mozilla extension to rewrite AllMusic. Adrian's at it again with a compiler for Grease Monkey scripts to pure Mozilla extensions, Python inside no less. That is a moby hack.

Ben Hyde is entertaining himself documenting all the mayhem that Grease Monkey is causing.

Jenson: atomfeed.py

2005-04-21T22:02:00-04:00

Link parkin': Googler Steve Jenson has released atomfeed a Python module for generating Atom syndication feeds, natch.

NMH: A Wikipedia Teaching Moment

2005-04-20T23:20:00-04:00

Yours truly is teaching an experimental intro class on, essentially, history of computing and very basic programming for non-majors. Think how to convince journalism underclassmen that computing, as an intellectual endeavor, is important.

Today I talked a bit about the Wikipedia in lecture. I even pulled up a Britney Spears page and hand waved about how I could vandalize it live and it would be fixed by the end of class. Note that I'm doing this in a pretty big lecture hall with the page projected to about 10 feet high. (Note to Alex H. Big for us is 20+ students. I feel your pain)

Enterprising student with laptop, and wireless access, vetts my claim, hacks Britney's page, and asks me to refresh. "Britney Spears (is in love with Brian Dennis) ...". Much laughter ensues. You get the picture. (For a bunch of technophobes, NU journalism majors are pretty well equipped)

I roll with the punch, laugh at myself and leave Britney up on the big board, and move on with the discussion. Not more than 2 minutes later, Britney's page has been fixed. The collective power of the Wikipedians has been amply demonstrated.

Best live demo I've ever given in my life.

And +1 on Professor D. He's got a sense of humor and he knows what he's talking about.

NMH: Still Alive

2005-04-18T23:49:00-04:00

Just a headsup, but I am actually still alive. Lots of interesting projects going on and consuming time.

By the by, I'm really starting to appreciate Drupal as a logical progression from a blogging tool to an accessible "content management system". I use the scare quotes because I think any blogging tool is a CMS, just with a very focused data model.

For all you media types looking for a sophisticated, open source platform, Drupal is the content management system behind Bryght, BlufftonToday, and UrbanVancouver.com.

Pomeroy: College BBall Stats

2005-04-12T20:25:00-04:00

Through a very circuitous and serendipitous path I chanced upon Ken Pomeroy's college bball statistics project. I believe the game scores were collected in a distributed fashion, and then made freely available for sports stats wonks to munge. I guess I'm slowly penetrating the community of peer-2-peer, non-baseball stats collectors I dreamed of when I was a regular on USENET's rec.sport.basketball.[pro,college]. If you have any Google chops, you can figure out who I was.

In any event here's my route. Daily Python URL > Bill Mill > game data > Ken Pomeroy > Ken's blog > Ken's stats project.

Ob geek talk. I essentially have two bins of feeds I'm subscribed to. One for monitoring, and one for serendipity. I need to build a tool that I can hand the serendipity bin to for filtering, clustering, analyzing, and visualization, so I can process potential serendipity items faster. The monitoring bin I could use to drive a focused crawler.

Back to the mines!!

Faassen: lxml

2005-04-11T23:09:00-04:00

Martijn Faassen has a working combination of Python, libxml, and the ElementTree API, called lxml. Fast as hell XML parsing in a Pythonic API. Nice!

Sampson: rawdog

2005-04-11T22:48:00-04:00

With Jaeger apparently going closed source, Adam Sampson's rawdog might be the best contender for an open source webfeed aggregator with Python inside. At least I think it's open source.

Actually, I'll just hedge and say I need to check the licenses on both ends. Still it's good to know of another starting point for aggregator hacking.

NMH: Decentralizing Services

2005-04-10T23:53:00-04:00

Thinking out loud. Suppose you wanted to experiment with a P2P version of a centralized service, especially a popular design like del.icio.us or flickr. Maybe you can't stand the uptime of a feed indexing service or want to experiment with some extensions to a social bookmark service. Trust me, this is all completely hypothetical. What's the design and implementation process look like? What guarantees can you make and what do you have to give up? I think, and this is mostly speculation, the majority of the academic P2P work probably relies on at least a few reliable, resilient, super nodes providing a backbone.

Alternatively, how far can you push towards P2P purity in implementing one of these popular, large scale Web services?

NMH: Aggregator Buddylists

2005-04-07T23:32:00-04:00

I'm sure someone somewhere must have hashed this out, but is there anything worthwhile in having buddylists for webfeed aggregators? For IM they provide presence and awareness. For aggregators they might provide the basis of a permission management scheme for distribution of subscription and readership information. Oh and if the aggregator supported per item tagging that might be made available to folks as well. Users could allow their aggregator to "chat" with other useful services and agents out there on the 'Net.

Haughey: Memory Maps

2005-04-06T19:17:00-04:00

So previously I was despairing of annotated images ever catching on, which nukes my 2005 as "Year of FotoNotes" prediction. Matt Haughey may have saved my bacon, with his "memory map" concept.

Take one Web based, high res, satellite image service, with an elegant user interface. Mix with social photo service. Stir in some sentimental geographically based remembrances. Add in a dash of A-List credibility and connectivity.

Voila! The Memory Map social space on Flickr.

Still, someone needs to implement hyperlinks within the annotations for some really explosive effects.

Good: Free Photos

2005-04-05T23:17:00-04:00

Robin Good gathers together in one place a number of useful royalty free stock photo sites.

Rosen: PressThink Pockets

2005-04-05T23:16:00-04:00

I could probably recommend just about every Jay Rosen post, but this recent mixed bag of commentary is especially worthwhile because it touches a couple of times on citizen's journalism. In particular, I found the reaction of some Canadians to the new effort Dose, interesting. Even though the Web supports it, folks will be suspicious of importing the infrastructure for citizen's media. At least if you spew a lot of rhetoric about how connected you are to the communities you purport to serve, but are based in a foreign land. Looks like a case study in the making.

Blogrunner: Annotated NYTimes

2005-04-04T22:27:00-04:00

Blogrunner demonstrates the ends to which watch engines can be put, in monitoring what the blogospheres are saying about The Gray Lady. Tools like these are increasingly within the horsepower of low end computers and the storage is chump change. Someone's going to come along and shrink wrap this stuff, or turn it into an elegant hosted web service, and all heck is going to break loose.

Technically it's just an aggregator, so there's no reason you couldn't pull similar tricks for individuals.

Rushkoff: Collective Evolution

2005-04-03T14:26:00-04:00

Apropos of nothing, I found Doug Rushkoff's first column for Arthur magazine quite inspiring. I travel in some circles where collective action gets short shrift . If enabling and exploring new forms of people peacefully getting stuff done together is a hallmark of our era, times aren't too bad.

NMH: Signals of Quality

2005-04-02T13:27:00-05:00

Thought parkin. One of the few metrics for evaluating content on the Web seems to be popularity. Easy to calculate, relatively, and seems to correlate with quality for at least "some" community. This is partially why folks love stuff like Technorati and Blogdex. (Is Blogdex even still alive? Does anyone care?).

What if you're evaluating a site, post, podcast, whatever, and you have no popularity information. Are there any other clues that might be indicators of quality?

One that comes to mind is consistency/regularity/reliability, which is why I liked the calenders that used to be on most blogs. You could get a quick metric of at least how long and frequently the author had been doing their thing. Skill improves with repetition so you'd presume that the longer you write/blog, the better you get at it. Plus it's an indication of commitment, which is an initial condition for quality.

Finally longevity and consistency is a metric a machine process could easily determine and might be something worthwhile for content recommenders to add in to recommended items.

Yelvington: BlufftonToday

2005-04-02T13:07:00-05:00

Steve Yelvington, one of the principals at Morris Digital Works, announces the launch of BlufftonToday.com. BlufftonToday is another citizen's journalism driven effort. While not ridiculously new, it's been going on in Vancouver (among other places) for a while, this might be portending a trend. Guys like Yelvington have major legitimacy within the news industry, validation from him, Dan Gillmor, Jay Rosen et. al. give other folks cover. Mavericks and innovators at news organizations won't have such a tough row to hoe.

Don't get me wrong, it's really early and unclear how the business angle will work out. However, an environment of considered experimentation is a good thing.

Besides, I just like pointing at stuff that's influenced, however tangentially, by goskokie.com.

Kaiser Family Foundation: Generation M

2005-04-01T15:50:00-05:00

Just the executive summary is a gutbomb to digest, but the Kaiser Family Foundation's report on Generation M: Media in the Lives of 8-18 Year Olds is chock full of interesting points. Based on a survey of over 2,000 youth the report is essentially a study of how, and with what media, young folks spend their time.

TV and music are dominant, although computers and the Internet have caught up with console video games in usage time. And the penetration of these devices is over 50% across all strata of society.

The interesting takeaways for me? Videogames and PCs don't displace TV and music. Time spent with media refuses to go down. Kids just do more multitasking. TV and IM. Homework and file sharing.

Reading the newspaper happened for 34% of the sample. The average time spent with the newspaper was only 6 minutes per day, although I can't tell if that's across the entire sample (bad) or those who actually read the paper (worse). Yikes!!

Via Gloria Pan @ morph.

Brown: Abandoning The News

2005-03-31T20:10:00-05:00

The contents are all old news to me, but Merrill Brown's report to the Carnegie Corporation of New York on how young folks are ditching the concept of traditional news is a complete package for the busy media wonk. Besides, the Carnegie name gives it gravitas, so it's at least a good citation for future media oriented papers and grant proposals.

I agreed with just about everything in Brown's report, but one thing rang really hollow:

Despite these innovations, some experts still warn that the news business

Willison: Greasing Mediation

2005-03-30T23:19:00-05:00

Back in September, I postulated that Web apps needed extensibility, but that you can't pull the old plug-in, or embedded scripting language tricks. What's a model for extending GMail?

Jon Udell may have named the solution to the conundrum. Instead of the app being extensible, it can have an architecture of intermediation. Udell is a bit sketchy on the details, but I'm guessing it involves generating protocol responses in structured formats that support transfomation. Also, the protocol can be proxied and manipulated at levels higher than dealing with HTTP requests and responses.

Simon Willison puts two and two together and identifies Greasemonkey as enabling the browser to become an agent of intermediation. With a little help from the server end, essentially well structured documents, your browser can start to do a heck of a lot more than render the results for you. Heck, it can even start talking to other distributed services, allowing you to extend things like del.icio.us without having to wait on jschacter.

Schachter: del.icio.us Full Time

2005-03-29T19:49:00-05:00

Looks like Joshua Schachter is going to go full time on del.icio.us development. Implications unclear. Let the buyout speculation be..er continue.

Odlyzko & Tilly: Metcalfe's Law Broken

2005-03-28T20:47:00-05:00

Link parkin': CNet summarizes Andrew Odlyzko and Benjamin Tilly's demonstration that all subgroups aren't equally valuable in a network. In fact, bad actors make some subsets have negative value, e.g. spammers.

Ben Hyde chimes in on the topic as well.

Allen: Smaller Than Dunbar

2005-03-28T20:43:00-05:00

Using some agent based simulations from a 2003 Nature paper, Chris Allen speculates that functional human groups actually have an expected size much smaller than the Dunbar number, said number being 150. I'm not sure about the validity of the conclusions, but was interested in the means of modeling and simulating group behavior and coordination. Seemed like a cool thing to hack up in a multi-agent simulator, or even just a good old scripting language.

Of course, some folks believe the Dunbar number is really wrong.

Adar: GUESS

2005-03-27T14:42:00-05:00

GUESS is Eytan Adar's (HP Labs) toolkit for doing graph exploration and visualization. GUESS is a combination of a custom Jython for querying graphs, JUNG for graph algorithms, and Piccolo, Prefuse, or Touchgraph for visualization. Not quite a Pajek or UCINET replacement but that's the long term goal. The big win is probably the embedded, domain specific, interactive language. And since Adar and his colleagues are working network analysts GUESS is being developed where the rubber meets the road.

Heilemann: Aggregato

2005-03-26T16:10:00-05:00

Tagging + aggregating seems to be catching on. Michael Heilemann launches aggregato.

NMH: Findory Needs API

2005-03-26T15:59:00-05:00

I like my personal Findory blogs feed. Serendipitously, I run across some interesting posts from feeds I'm not subscribed to. However, I don't need Findory to tell me about new posts to plasticbag for example. I'm already subscribed with Bloglines.

Of course there doesn't seem to be a good reason why my aggregator couldn't tell Findory that, other than that there isn't any way to do so.

Take this request with a grain of salt though. First, I'm probably an outlier power user who uses Findory and an aggregator, whereas Findory is aiming to be the primary aggregator for many folks. Second, providing a well designed, well performing API is not without challenges. Although as Linden points out, for some tasks so what if they're hard, the're worth doing anyway.

Strom: Personalizing RSS

2005-03-25T23:32:00-05:00

A while ago, I talked about how the Daily Me is here and that a key aspect would be focusing on personal information streams.

The eminent David Strom backs me up.

Paul: Bad News on "New News"

2005-03-25T23:20:00-05:00

From the vantage of someone who's been watching online media for over 10 years, Nora Paul takes a look back at some of the anticipated benefits. Examining the potential for the Web to let reporter's communicate better with the audience, she has this quote:

The harshest reality that news organizations have to face is that readers are finding each other, cutting out the

NMH: del.icio.us knockoffs

2005-03-25T11:08:00-05:00

While Joshua is dicking around with barcharts, the del.icio.us knockoffs exploring really interesting functionality are coming.

Here's one vote for just getting the dang inbox working.

Persuadio.com: MyDensity

2005-03-24T19:10:00-05:00

Persuadio's interactive blog link exploration site MyDensity exemplifies horrible infoviz execution, when it actually works. I only point to it because I know my favorite visualiation toolkit prefuse, is inside, and MyDensity doesn't even bother to give Jeff Heer's fine work credit.

Sauvage: webgobbler

2005-03-24T19:03:00-05:00

Link parkin': Seb Sauvage's webgobbler remixes digital images. Python inside.

Coates: Social Set Top Boxes

2005-03-24T18:55:00-05:00

I sort of admire the folks working hard on social designs for television viewing, like Tom Coates' thoughtful prototype renderings. They're really, really trying. Admirably sisyphean.

Unfortunately, this all seems so oxymoronic, because TV viewing is fundamentally anti-social. Anything designed, both in form and content, to dominate your visual cognitive capacity doesn't leave many spare cycles for recognizing interaction opportunities with your pals, much less higher order social interaction.

There's a reason it's called an Idiot Box.

Gonze: Unsubscribe List

2005-03-23T18:51:00-05:00

LOL. Lucas Gonze's new mailing list idea is so stupid, it just might work.

Kleinberg & Tardos: Algorithm Design

2005-03-23T15:07:00-05:00

A pretty deep geek signifier is when you're excited to get your review copy of Jon Kleinberg and Eva Tardos new textbook Algorithm Design.

A quick scan indicates it's not completely graph/network wonky, but that the motivating problems are definitely a little more up to date than CLR although I don't have the second edition of that textbook.

Efimova: Blog Thinking

2005-03-23T12:07:00-05:00

Link parkin: Lilia Efimova doing some good thinking out loud about blogging and research.

Benson: SXSW, ETech, and Tags

2005-03-22T00:29:00-05:00

Erik Benson, in summarizing his view of ETech and SXS2 2005, hits on a point which gets continually washed out by the taxonomy/folksonomy arguments: people tag things for many different reasons, concluding that people aren't being rational in their tagging. The big hope is that a pile of autonomous labels will reveal patterns of classification.

Hidden in there are patterns of communication, coordination, and collective activity. C. f. The Gates Memory Project, Squared Circle, and Day In The Life Of....

Tags are used as much for signaling others as they are a remembrance device.

Oh, and being in Chicago, I have to say "less is more".

Voidspace: "Rocket Radio" Transcript

2005-03-21T00:08:00-05:00

The Street finds its own uses for things - uses the manufacturers never imagined.
Rocket Radio, William Gibson, Rolling Stone, June 15, 1989.

Flickr: Owned by Y!

2005-03-20T19:48:00-05:00

The rumor mill can move on. Done deal, Yahoo! has acquired Ludicorp. Let's hope they see a better fate than Blogger.

Now's a good time for me to get off a few cheap shots on Flickr though, ;-/. One, what's up with an XML-RPC API where every response is an XML-RPC string of the REST API response? No wonder no one uses the XML-RPC API. Lame.

Two. Annotations are FotoNotes on the surface, but downloaded photos don't have the annotation data embedded in the metadata headers.

Nits though. Those fine folks have been doing good work, making photos of the Web. Expecting more good things to come...

Golder: Webbed Footnotes

2005-03-20T12:16:00-05:00

Scot Golder, who I've shared a couple of meals with at conferences, is investigating shared annotation of webpages, through his Webbed Footnotes project. I'm interested to see how the rating system works out. Unfortunately, I've got way too much work to seriously participate in someone else's research project, but maybe some of my 6 or so readers will join in. Besides, I don't read the NY Times, the target publication, online that much.

P.S. That's a joke son. I know there's more than 6 of you out there.

Kraus: SW Long Tail

2005-03-20T12:05:00-05:00

Joe Kraus, head honcho at JotSpot, recently posted about long tail for software. The rough idea is that in any business, there are a bunch of company and situation specific business processes. This becomes a combinatorial explosion of opportunities for software solutions. The current solution for businesses is Email+Excel (might as well read Outlook+Excel), which has issues with version control, change notification, and integrating other documents. Of course the Wiki based JotSpot is designed to solve these problems.

The thinking has gotten plenty of play amongst tech blogs, but I'm a bit skeptical, and mainly thinking out loud. Not so much skeptical that there aren't a bazillion business process instances, but that they can be aggregated like "searches" or "product matches". Also, business processes aren't so much disposable as adapted. Yeah you might be able to think of each job search requiring a slightly different business process, but it's not started from scratch.

Maybe I'm putting too fine a point on it, but there's a big difference between a bazillion problem instances and a million problem classes.

Savage, McCormick, Snydal: Project Placesite

2005-03-19T18:36:00-05:00

I have a real soft spot for cafes, up to the point of working in one for about a year as a grad student just for the hell of it (Nefeli for you Berkeley denizens). Recently I've been meandering throughout Evanston getting most of my work done at Mud, Liquid, and Unicorn. I'm a multiple visit per day type of person. Name a cafe in Evanston, and I've been in it.

Recently, I've been feeling, not quite ashamed, but odd pulling out my laptop. There's now a teeming horde of laptop folk. It's gotten to the point that you'll have pairs/couples working across two laptops at the same table.

Well back in my old stomping grounds, Jon Snydal, Damon McCormick, and Sean Savage are investigating this effect, among other things, with Project Placesite. I couldn't quite put my finger on what was bugging me until I read their exposition of The Zombie Effect. Publicly staring deep into a virtual world that others can't join in is probably a muted form of the public cell phone conversation effect. Of course, I'm a prime offender.

Oddly enough, I'm not sure this is actually a problem per se. Two of the cafes I frequent are essentially startups, and I know they would be seriously struggling if they didn't have a stable of Zombies drawn by free wi-fi. Plus, I don't particularly find laptop folks any more or less approachable then say snobby looking folks reading The New Yorker.

Last point, Evanston would make a very interesting case study on the commercial impact of Wi-Fi on small vendors, especially cafes. We have a local incumbent which, seemingly reluctantly, moved to for pay access. This despite heavy usage by a CS department and tons of laptop carrying undergrads. (Aside, our VP of IT claims 80% of our frosh came to campus with a laptop. Yikes!) Meanwhile, the aforementioned upstart cafes have arisen, along with Wi-Fi in a few other sit down spots, plus the deployment by the big boys like Barnes & Noble and Borders. I don't know if the slow move to Wi-Fi made a difference on Unicorn, but I see a lot of customer distribution to the new places.

Levin, Lischinski, Weiss: Autocolorizing Images

2005-03-18T23:59:00-05:00

Someone needs to take Colorization Using Optimization and hack it into a tool for munging Flickr photostreams. In fact a general tool, or Photoshop plug-in, for pulling down Flickr photos, hacking them and reinserting them would be pretty useful.

For the intrigued, the referenced paper allows end users to do some color scribbling on a monochrome image, followed by an automated pass to colorize the image in its entirety. Seems to generate pretty good results and to also be extensible to video. Kewl!!

Leung: Geek Baggin'

2005-03-17T23:51:00-05:00

Apropos of nothing, I don't particularly care what's in Ted Leung's bag, but I like knowing what his bags are.

Karben: Statsology

2005-03-17T23:22:00-05:00

I don't talk about sports much here, but I'm a closet sports junkie. I grew up at the intersection of ACC and Big East country. I've been listing to sports talk forever, practically daily since about 1993. The first weekend of the NCAA tournament was essentially a 4 day holiday for a few years in grad school.

In honor of that fine event, I'll tip my hat to PaidContent.org for actually taking online sports seriously and pointing towards Alan Karben's Statsology blog. The site is a veritable cornucopia of links to topics I've been looking for for years. I always thought sports would be a fine segment of the online market to be involved in. Passionate communities, tons of numbers to crunch, serious money and a patina of real journalism, what's not to like?

Karben is doing a great job of hitting each of these points in his coverage of the Fantasy Sports Trade Association. Who knew! This strikes me as a space where some social software experiments would turn up some interesting results.

P. S. Looks like I went 16-0 on a bracket today, and while I do play multiple sheets it's not like I go hog wild. One rational, one radical, and one for rooting does it.

Wyman: Game Over Blogland

2005-03-16T19:11:00-05:00

Bob Wyman thinks blog tool innovation is marked for death with an apparently serious entry of Microsoft into the space. Toss in Yahoo! getting into the game and you can start to see some serious lockin developing. Then again, the sky was falling when AOL journals was about to come on line too. Wyman is also being a bit parochial in that he's an advocate of structured blogging essentially the embedding of more task specific tools within blog apps. If blog tools go the way of IE development, then he's got a point.

One possible interesting effect of this development is a serious arms race around Web services. If it's still about getting developer mind share as well as users, then being smart about Web services will be a serious strategic advantage, and the field is relatively level here. With big time stakes, we may get an answer to that SOAP v. REST debate real quick. Also, I generally don't bet against MS developers, but buildling scalable, reliable, secure web services is new territory for them. Has MS actually delivered a Web service API that folks regularly build on?

In fact, other than Amazon I don't feel too many crews have actually gotten serious Web services right. Flickr is about as close as I've seen from a small shop, and they're still working out glitches. Google's AdSense might be roughly considered one as well, but concrete positive examples are few and far between.

Pazzani: Web Personalization Seminar

2005-03-15T21:56:00-05:00

If you're a researcher into various socially oriented technologies, you could do worse than to work through Michael Pazzani's Web Personalization seminar syllabus. Pazzani's a long time machine learning guy and also did a stint as a director at NSF.

Via Seb Paquet

Udell: Delicious Screencast

2005-03-15T21:42:00-05:00

Despite the fact that I'm just this side of detesting screencasts, there were 5 seconds of insight at the end of Jon Udell's whirlwind overview of del.icio.us. Of course since it's continuous media, I can't go back and find the exact quote, so I'll paraphrase, regarding how languages develop from pidgin:

All you need is an environment that let's people speak to each other, hear each other, and adapt their behavior to what they hear.

Recommended if you don't know much about del.icio.us.

openclipart.org: Free Vector Graphics

2005-03-14T23:05:00-05:00

Link parkin': For that next whizzy presentation, open source vector graphics, many at least halfway decent.

Crosbie: Digital Dirigibles

2005-03-14T22:59:00-05:00

On the heels of Adrian Holovaty dismissing EmPRINT, Vin Crosbie makes the most eloquent case against digital editions I've seen yet.

Sifry: State of the Blogosphere

2005-03-14T22:52:00-05:00

David Sifry is posting The State of the Blogosphere from Technorati's perspective. Precis: big spike in weblogs tracked, lots of spam weblogs detected.

I'll reserve commentary other than to say two things. One, more of these from other institutions would be useful. Some independent verification would be nice. Two, more transparency on how such numbers are derived is sorely needed.

The scientist in me is looking for reproducible results.

NMH: Why FotoNote?

2005-03-10T23:51:00-05:00

Thought parkin'. Most of the photo annotations I've seen are pretty banal. And it doesn't appear that many of the photos on Flickr take advantage of this capability. I'm willing to bet a trivial percentage of Flickr photos are actually annotated. Annotation is work. Most photos probably speak as a unit. What's the point?

Two options. One: annotating becomes cooler, easier, more interactive, more networked, more weblike. Two: photos automatically generate a small set of annotations, which people can easily filter and add to.

Gonze & Nerot: Mapping Webjay

2005-03-09T22:32:00-05:00

Despite a terminally confusing display and interaction, Lucas Gonze and Olivier Nerot have teamed up to provide a tantalizing Java based visualization that provides interactive maps of Webjay's playlist space.

Memo to social software folks, there might be a network in your system, but network visualizations are notoriously hard to make comprehensible. You're probably better off looking at other types of displays that are driven by results gleaned from network analysis.

But they do make pretty good eye candy!!

Microupdate added visualization apres Lucas Gonze's response.

Flickr +IFB: Gates Memory Project

2005-03-08T21:48:00-05:00

No, not Bill Gates memory project. Christo's Central Park Gates.

Flickr and The Institute for the Future of the Book (is it me, or is there an institute for everything, other than the enrichment of junior faculty?!) are teaming up to record an online visual memory of The Gates installation. They don't quite know what they're going to do other than collect the photos. All those photo annotation and management folks should be licking their chops and proposing stuff.

Hint: since all the photos are just going into Flickr, public no less, with a particular tag, you can use the Flickr APIs to do some cool stuff.

Zuardi: Musicplayer

2005-03-07T23:52:00-05:00

musicplayer is a Flash based audio player that's driven by XSPF playlists. Concocted by Fabricio Zuardi, but contextualized by Lucas Gonze, musicplayer makes it easy to put a little Web audio player, directly into a Web page. Spiffy!

NMH: Egosurfing

2005-03-07T22:20:00-05:00

Google points Brian Dennis to the last place I thought it ever would. But as anticipated, I still own media hack despite Wired News' might. And it's not like Penenberg has been slacking.

Still fightin' the power laws!!

Zoundry: Zoundry Blog Editor

2005-03-05T23:07:00-05:00

Now Zoundry has an interesting approach to making money off of blogging. The've developed what looks like a nice blog editor, that works with Atom API supporting tools. The twist is that the editor makes it easy to add links to products, presuming you're writing reviews or other content that might encourage a purchase. Meanwhile, Zoundry provides a complementary affilliate program centralization service, which will manage your product click throughs, for a small cut. The win is that you sign up one place, but reap from multiple programs.

Doubt if this is really for me, although I may try the blog editor as I really haven't seen one I like for Windows. I don't do affiliate programs. But this strikes me as a pretty innovative way to get desktop software to pay for itself.

Infosential: Executive Podsummaries

2005-03-04T19:28:00-05:00

Infosential is Tim Duckett and Wayne Robinson. They're a small UK tech consulting concern focusing on usages of social software in business. Vanilla enough.

They're workflow for helping a busy exec stay on top of the tech blogosphere is quite interesting. They use what I call watch engines (PubSub, Google Alerts) to track topics of interest to their client as an incoming stream. Then they sift and edit the material to construct short spoken summaries recorded in MP3s. The summaries are then shipped as podcasts, using RSS, through an aggregator, into the overwhelmed execs iPod shuffle. Slick.

Now this strikes me as a decent alternative business model for aggregation and podcasting. Alternative in the sense that it really doesn't need advertising. As long as you're not looking for megabucks success, subscriptions could support a decent business I think.

And for you wankers thinking about how to automate the human voice out of the loop, give it up. It's probably easier to outsource the problem to India.

Hat tip to Bob Wyman, who rightly notes the very real small scale, social issues a busy exec faces: on airplanes all the time, can't slog paper, often disconnected, need for easy, cheap tech, etc. etc.

Oh yeah, and more ammo, competitive intelligence, for why this aggregation stuff is important.

Gershman & Gonze: Blogdigger + Webjay

2005-03-04T19:03:00-05:00

Blogdigger, a webfeed search engine I should have linked to a long time ago, and Webjay, the open playlist emporium are teaming up to support better continuous media search. If Blogdigger can help Webjayers find open source media faster, the world will be a better place.

Gregorio: The Restful Web

2005-03-04T18:54:00-05:00

I'm late to the party, but Joe Gregorio is writing a column on building RESTful applications for O'Reilly. I particularly liked the article describing how to build a RESTful bookmark service, sort of like plumbing for a del.icio.us knockoff. I wonder how much better, worse, and/or different del.icio.us would be with similar design.

Hat tip to Ryan Tomayko's link blog.

NYPL: Digtial Gallery

2005-03-03T22:31:00-05:00

The New York Public Library unleashed a huge archive of images on the world. As something of a curator of these sites, I'm always curious as to what the reuse terms are. Apparently, most of the NYPL images are in the public domain, says the faq, but then mumbles about "freely available for personal use". That doesn't jibe does it?!

One other thing about these "public domain" archives. Why don't organizations ever make bundled versions of these collections available? Suppose I'm a scientist (I play one on TV) who thinks a collection of images, or recordings would make a great dataset. Maybe for some image analysis expriements, or explorations into digital media authoring tools. What're my options to get a hold of the complete archive in a nice handy tarball or iso? One, ask nicely and pray. Two, write a Web crawler. Both feel a bit,...unpalatable.

Galbraith: Wists

2005-03-02T23:54:00-05:00

Can't quite figure out what the heck Wists are for, but they've got tags, buddy lists, and apparently mechanisms for grouping tagged items. Looks like del.icio.us with more spit and polish and some straightforward interface and collaboration extensions.

David Galbraith seems to be the ringleader behind the project. I have to point out though that automatically constructing social networks based on a click will eventually be counterproductive. Tire kicking leads to network management leads to work weeding out stuff every time I just test drive a tie. Blech!

Odd how Wists and Blogmarks, another thumbnail/bookmark combo, surface in the same week. Oh, and what's the over /under on first porn sighting?

Update: Fixed missing angle bracket, so I'm not dissing David Galbraith, who's a fine chap as far as I know.

Yahoo!: Web Services APIs

2005-03-01T22:10:00-05:00

Yahoo! has joined the party providing Web Services APIs ala Amazon, Google, Technorati, Flickr, del.icio.us, et. al. Jeremy Zawodny has a good roundup of Web commentary.

One thing I was going to kvetch about was the fact that they have a usage limited API key, like Google's 1 grand calls per day. This feature makes it tough to build a desktop client to distribute for testing, because any decent number of users would quickly chew up your call allocation. According to Phil Ringanalda though, there's a bit of method in their rate limiting madness. Since it's IP address based, roughly each user get's charged for calls, not the developer. Hackers can distribute away, although you can't be profligate with calls, or you'll cheese of users.

Congrats Yahoo!

P.S. SOAP is passed over again.

Brown: Niche Communities

2005-02-28T23:39:00-05:00

At HICSS 38, John Seely Brown had pretty clearly focused on "mass amateurization" as one of his talking points. Mary Grush's interview with Brown in Campus Technology, captures some of what he's been thinking about. However, this Demos white paper on "The Pro-Am Revolution", by Charles Leadbeater and Paul Miller, better captures the spirit and in more detail.

Sandler, et. al.: FeedTree

2005-02-27T17:56:00-05:00

A Rice CS team of Sandler, Mislove, Post, and Druschel have sketched a scheme for distributing webfeed content using P2P publish and subscribe, called FeedTree. To appear in the 4th International Worksop on Peer-to-Peer Systems, FeedTree is designed to help deal with webfeed bandwidth issues. I call it a sketch because the paper is a bit short on implementation details and has no performance analysis, but as Wes Felter says, "maybe Rice will actually ship".

The tricky bit, which the paper tries to address somewhat but not satisfactorily, is how to deal with the legacy implementations. You could be looking at an IPV4 vs IPV6 situation again. Also, deploying to PlanetLab seems lame to me. Build something real publishers might want to use and go from there, even if it's a limited subset of the real world. Hack up a budding, open source, client like Jaeger and work with one of the webfeed engines (PubSub, Technorati, Bloglines, FeedBurner) to see how this could play out. That'll provide bigger impact plus an independent, empirical analysis of webfeed behavior would be more useful than simulations on PlanetLab. Besides, you'll need a model for those simulations anyway.

Visible Path: Centrality Blog

2005-02-24T23:50:00-05:00

Visible Path has started a blog a relationship capital, nee social network, related blog entitled Centrality. Looks like it's going to be a bit heavy on the corporate angle, but Stanley Wasserman, who literally wrote the book on social network analysis, is committed to writing for the blog, so it can't be all bad.

Leung: Aggregators Pushing Performance?

2005-02-23T22:45:00-05:00

Ted Leung notes that he interacts with the Web much more through his aggregator than his browser, and he subscribes to a lot (1000?) of feeds. Combine with aggregator side analysis and he sees it as an opportunity to productively burn future cycles.

I have to respectfully disagree. When we're tallking machines in the Ghz range, and I think 1 Ghz is the low end of desktops these days, with 1/2 Gb of memory, they should be able to analyze 4000 RSS items a day easily. This is purely a gut feeling, but I'm betting aggregators are actually network bound, not CPU bound. There's relatively mature, optimized packages out there for the techniques Leung's thinking about. Just as an example, see how Steven Johnson uses DevonThink, which must have some similar stuff inside. Granted Johnson's research material might not be growing at the same rate as a complete archive of Leung's blogroll, but this analysis stuff has been pounded on for a long time. It's really only when you get to Google/Amazon/Yahoo!/MS scale problems, trying to do it for millions of users in real time that things get hairy. Besides, Leung is probably an outlier although I realize making things better for prosumers typically propagates to all users.

Now more cycles for rendering analysis derived pretty pictures, visualizations, charts, and graphs , especially interactive, might be a welcome driver for future CPU sales.

NMH: Long Tail, Low Info?

2005-02-22T23:57:00-05:00

Just a thought, can we get enough information to make decent decisions about long tail items in a hyper-niche information market? If you anticipate a power law distribution, most stuff won't be rated, linked to, or written about enough to decently feed a recommendation engine. Does it even matter? If stuff is cheap enough, I just need to get in the vicinity of items that might be attractive to and then I can root around to pick something. A few clunkers doesn't really matter as long as I get a steady stream of useful things, and a few hits.

Maybe the best long tail tools will help people window shop. Instead of trying to make recommendations, make the overall process of sifting enjoyable, efficient, and social.

Ali: Trendum

2005-02-21T23:25:00-05:00

Rafat Ali jots a note regarding Trendum including mention of a $3 million investment from AC Nielsen, and former big name clients such as Time Warner, CNN, and HBO. Trendum specializes in monitoring, analyzing, and reporting on various parts of the Internet for their clients' benefit.

On a couple of occasions, I've been given a hard time about why anyone should be interested in better tools for analyzing and understanding the blogosphere. How much analysis do we need of navel gazers, rabble rousers, teenage girls, and cat owners? The money placed in Trendum is a pretty concrete example of why this stuff might be important.

Richardson: UltraGleeper

2005-02-20T21:48:00-05:00

Leanord Richardson has cooked up the Ultra Gleeper essentially a single person, or small group, recommendation engine for Web pages. The Ultra Gleeper is interesting in that it uses blogrolls, watch engines (Technorati, del.icio.us webfeeds), and ratings in an attempt to avoid a number of standard problems with recommender systems. You can read all about the design in Richardson's CodeCon paper.

I like it a lot as a potential experimentation platform, but in thinking a bit about potential uses, I forced myself into a conundrum. Without a specific task, what do people need recommendations for? This is a case where good enough is the enemy of best. If I'm just browsing, surfing, and trawling the blogosphere, I've got more than enough feeds to provide good morsels. If I need more serendipity I can just tap into Findory or the various dexes.

But if I don't have a particular task, how can a technology say it's made my life any better? Greg Linden will say news personalization has "learned what I need" and is giving it to me, but by what metric?

Alternatively, how do we know the Ultra Gleeper or Findory are doing any better than random? And what does "doing better" mean?

However, all hope is not lost. There are plenty of places where a task might be explicit or implicit and a recommendation engine might be appropriate. For example, if I really am a blogger, writer, analyzer, synthesizer ( no jokes from the peanut gallery sometimes I wonder too), then a recommendation engine can keep its eyes on the lookout for corners of the world I should be interested in, given what I write on. This is a soft definition of what I need, but at least there's some hope of knowing that I get better at it by getting what I need. And there's plenty of contexts and activities where a similar story can be told. I pity the recommender's though, who don't have much of a picture of what the user is trying to achieve, if anything.

Sippey: Automashup

2005-02-19T18:36:00-05:00

Michael Sippey entertains that mashups might be automatically generated

Seems like a no brainer for a genetic algorithms or reinforcement learning researcher to try and tackle.

Moment of silence for Stating the Obvious....

Thank you.

Crosbie: Serve Customers not Content

2005-02-19T18:19:00-05:00

I don't know why I hadn't been subscribed to the weblog for Vin Crosbi'es consultancy Digital Deliverance, but I like what I've been seeing recently. In particular, his missive for media companies to focus on customer relationship management in their online efforts seems right. No use shoveling your print/broadcast content down another pipe without any differentiation.

He also tells a fascinating tale of what's going on at Critical Mention, a startup that's leveraging computing to monitor TV programs for corporate intelligence and PR management (my summary). The bigger win is in techniques for making digitized video searchable.

Memo to Vin: check out your archives and permalink pages. I don't know if it's intentional but they sure don't look pretty at my end. Looks like a missing stylesheet somewhere.

Update Tweaked Critical Motion to the correct Critical Mention.

BoingBoing: Ads + Feeds

2005-02-18T23:43:00-05:00

BoingBoing is ably demonstrating a looming difficulty with webfeeds and advertising. BoingBoing is in the Creative Commons, using the Attribution-Commercial license. If I "remix" their feed, for free, and remove the ads, I'm guessing they wouldn't be happy.

The bigger tarpit is a potential clash of commercial interests. What if some other commercial entity wraps aggregated webfeed content with contextual ads that are in direct competition with the ads in a feed. Think trying to make a buck off of MyYahoo! The content providers probably have the legal high ground and are fair in demanding some kind of payback. But then middleman or client side wrappers and remixers have to negotiate hoards of licenses. Or bend over for centralized providers like Moreover. Strikes me as a mean disincentive to provide high quality aggregation services, which cost money to develop, deploy and support.

Maybe there'll be a middle tier of "prosumer" aggregators, desktop one time fee, or web based subscription supported. These guys will innovate on useful but not wildly popular features where you can get paid by not conflicting with the ads.

Parparita: Foxlineslicious

2005-02-17T23:10:00-05:00

Mihai Parparita demonstrates how to integrate Bloglines and del.icio.us by extending Firefox to rewrite Bloglines' clip links. Now that puts me in heaven.

Serendipitously, I also found out about the greasemonkey Firefox extension, which let's you hijack the browser's internal representation of a page and modify it to your heart's content. Sort of gives you a toolbox to start doing the type of things the new Google toolbar does, except much more under your control.

Mayfield: Personalization v Socialization

2005-02-16T00:29:00-05:00

I hate to be snarky, but somedays I really miss Suck.

I'm not sure it's possible to have a more buzzword compliant pile of marketing fu. Brandmasters? Brandmasters?!

A shining example of a false dichotomy. There's no reason personalization and socialization can't be blended. Two great tastes that might taste great together.

Skrenta: The Incremental Web

2005-02-15T23:48:00-05:00

Rich Skrenta, NU alum and CEO of Topix.net has a good wide ranging post on "The Incremental Web", his term for the rapidly growing, frequntly updating portion of the Web. The gist? This part of the Web is the frontline for research, development, new services, and new businesses.

For the most part I agree with where Skrenta is headed. It's interesting how a range of approaches to interacting with the Incremental Web are emerging. We've got neanderthal RSS aggregators, hyper-personalized tools like Findory, topic oriented Topix.net, and who knows what else lurking in the hinterlands.

One point of departure I have though, is the intense emphasis on freshness. While it shows up in the "newspaper", one thing editorial staff is good for is reconciling and recontextualizing new information with past content. Think of all those retrospectives, backgrounders, recaps, and chronologies your local ink stained wretches put together. Something that usefully mixed The Incremental Web and The Reference Web would be mighty handy.

Calcanis: No $$ In Aggregation

2005-02-09T23:51:00-05:00

Jason Calcanis lays out a bit of his perspective on the backstory regarding the Bloglines sale. Besides laying out Mark Fletcher as playing both sides of the developing deal, Calcanis argues that the only lucrative market for aggregators is corporate tuned clients. In particular, sources that provide advertising supported content through feeds are not going to let aggregators add their own ads, at least not without a cut of the action. Not to mention that, another big content provider, CNet, has entered the fray with Newsburst

This portends the aggregator schism I've remarked upon earlier. Calcanis seems to make an assumption that aggregators won't severely mutate birthing a new market, an assertion which the folks at Findory might not agree with.

Calcanis post via Read/Write Web

Holovaty: Lawrence.com 2.0

2005-02-08T22:39:00-05:00

Adrian Holovaty summarizes the new hotness at Lawrence.com. RSS and search alerts make it easier for folks to, gasp!, keep track of their news.

Some folks talk about citizen's journalism and shaking up newspapers, while others have done it.

NMH: Eatin' Crow

2005-02-08T22:12:00-05:00

Crow. Fork. Mouth. Insert.

Marry Hodder was absolutely right about Ask Jeeves buying Bloglines.

Linden: Findory As Aggregator

2005-02-07T22:55:00-05:00

I'm starting to be persuaded by Gregory Linden's pitching of Findory as a next generation webfeed aggregator, with social intelligence baked in. I'm thinking there will eventually be a schism in how people use webfeeds somewhat similar to e-mail. There will be a teeming horde who interface relatively naively to syndicated content, maybe through a tool like Findory, ala Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, Outlook Express etc. etc. Then there will be a decent sized, but not huge, pool of folks who work with such content at a higher, more sophisticated level, and will need more powerful tools, e.g. NetNewsWire or Bloglines, analagous to hardcore Outlook, Eudora, and Oddpost users.

And just so it doesn't look like I'm smooching Findory's rear too much, I have to say I'm finding the personalized sports news feed practically useless. ESPN and ESPN Radio basically crush the Findory feed on timeliness, and all the news sources report on the same thing every day. Now if they had a sports oriented blog and news columnist personalized feed, that might work better for me. Give me more from the margins, not the center!!

NMH: FeedFilters

2005-02-06T15:54:00-05:00

Thought parkin:' An aggregator that allowed one to tag individual posts would also provide a nice mechanism for helping train Bayesian filters. This could help deal with spam problem in tag feeds. And we have ample evidence from e-mail that people can understand and learn this mechanism.

Hodder: Jeeves + Bloglines

2005-02-06T15:49:00-05:00

Mary Hodder is reporting that Ask Jeeves has bought Bloglines. I'm inclined to believe there's something going on, but the reporting of the event strikes me as odd all the way around.

First off, in regards to her sources, we only get "I learned it from a couple of folks.". Journalists can be accused of a lot of failings, but an ethic of documented sourcing and verification is a good property. "Even if your mother tells you, check it out". Also, there have been no independent verifications, which typically happens with professional news sources on "big" stories, and no denials from either Ask Jeeves or Bloglines. Finally, notice the nuanced language from John Battelle one of the best at this stuff: "claim", "much more to say on this later".

Besides, if true, given who I wanted to purchase Bloglines, I'm highly disappointed AskJeeves might close the deal. I've just never had a high opinion of their search and I'm suspicious of Bloglines becoming overrun by ads. I'm not even sure it makes AskJeeves that much more palatable. Who wants to buy a premier aggregator company with a second tier search engine attached?

From the given evidence, I'd say there was some kind of financial agreement made, but maybe not a complete purchase.

Butterfield: On Flickr

2005-02-05T17:40:00-05:00

Good in-depth interview by Richard Koman with Stuart Butterfield, one of the masterminds behind Flickr.

Choice quote on APIs by Butterfield:

On the strictly practical side, I think we had one person inquire about using the SOAP version of the API. I don't know if any apps were actually built. There is at least one application built on XML-RPC. But all the others--I don't even know how many there are--are built on the REST API. It's just so easy to develop that way; I think it's foolish to do anything else.

Findory: Neighbors

2005-02-05T17:09:00-05:00

The folks at Findory are doing lots of interesting things. Gregory Linden has a roundup of reactions to Findory Neighbors. The tool presents blogs related to a given one, by showing a weighted word list of source titles.

Findory Neighbors currently is a nice one shot whizzy hack. I'm probably too much of a wonk for it to be really effective, but transparency would be nice. I have some gut sense of why I get what's in my neighborhood and the weights, but some explanatory data would increase confidence and aid navigation. Transparency in terms of how the connections are determined would be nice, ala PubSub's LinkRanks explanation. Also, longitudinal information, e.g. monthly neighborhood snapshots, would be really interesting.

del.icio.us: Popular + Sparklines

2005-02-04T19:31:00-05:00

Okay, I must be working too hard. I missed that del.icio.us has added sparklines to the most popular listings. If you don't know what a sparkline is, term coined by Edward Tufte, the device is a small graphical data display that takes on word like properties. You start to recognize certain sparkline shapes as words that support discussion of data. Think of how a flatline on an EKG says "boy I was daid!"

Anyhoo, this is a welcome addition in determining why a popular link is actually popular.

Ranchero: NetNewsWire 2.0b22

2005-02-04T19:10:00-05:00

Even though I don't use NetNewsWire regularly anymore, sorry Brent, I still like to pump it as the gold standard for desktop webfeed aggregators. Looks like it's approaching another milestone release.

Given some of the new features, integration with Bloglines and search by Findory, I will now engage in rampant speculation that a new webfeed and syndication powerhouse could emerge from the margins. A little consolidation here and there, you never know, combined with a little complacency from the big boys, and voila! C'mon, tell me you saw Google coming 10 years ago.

Okay, so don't bet the mortgage on that tip. But it's neat how some of the "smaller" players are working with each other.

Guardian: Newspoint Aggregator

2005-02-04T18:25:00-05:00

Via Jeff Jarvis, then Rafat Ali, UK's The Guardian is offering a branded desktop RSS aggregator, called Newspoint. The tech company behind the app, Consenda is funded by Advance.Net and the LA Times. I've worked on a hyperlocal citizen's media project supported by the former, and the latter is a Tribune newspaper.

Very, very interesting. I wouldn't have thought for media companies to strike out into desktop app territory. While this scheme can support a better user experience, this is just out of their core competency. Maybe the gizmo is a thin desktop interface, with a mostly Web application infrastructure underneath. That's essentially what the Gush guys do, with Flash and Python. Besides, all of those guys have big Web and Web application knowledge in house, so why not do a Web based aggregator or outsource to Bloglines or Yahoo! for that matter?

Enough of the tech noodling though. This signals that some more of the big media companies are starting to "get" web syndication and feel it's territory worth experimenting in. They'd better before Yahoo! et. al. completely dominate the space. Also, I say some more because at the next to last Online News Association, here in Evanston, I alerted some media types that this stuff might be a big deal, and actually heard about a few interesting projects.

Final bon mot. If a local news company can make the aggregator branding hyper-locally oriented, both geographically, North Shore of Chicago say, and socially, e.g. high school sports fans, minivan moms, 20something partiers, they might have a winner. Throw it on a disk. Throw it on newcomers' doorsteps. Instant gateway to the community. The targeted news comes to you, courtesy of your friendly neighborhood newspaper monopoly. And advertisers would probably go bananas.

peterme: Non-Taxonomy Tagging

2005-02-02T22:16:00-05:00

I'm as big a fan of tagging as anyone, but the rampage to determine if tagging can or can't generate useful emergent taxonomies befuddles me. At least in the del.icio.us incarnation, tagging is supposed to be highly personal. You're just marking your stuff. Who cares if it confuses the heck out of other folks.

Peter Merholz observes that social effects are overriding any metadata imperative. Tags are being used for signalling not taxonomizing. Instead of marking to help people categorize stuff, you mark to announce to the world that some piece of media is now available for a particular audience. Turning every tag into a post-and-poll stream like del.icio.us and Flickr, or tying into an engine with search feeds, like Technorati, makes it easy to track the signals.

The key difference is that with signaling, people only think in the moment. There's no sense of posterity, which probably leads to impoverishd metadata. I mean who wants to think about the right way to tag that party picture?!

Johnson: Thought Tooling

2005-02-01T23:59:00-05:00

Steven Berlin Johnson documents his desktop research tools, adds further depth on his blog, and then makes the penultimate connection, bringing together blogging as a research tool with desktop search. There's still a lot of mileage to go in this general direction, and it veers away from the bloggers vs journalist morass.

But if only I had a nickel for any time Vannevar Bush's Memex was invoked!!

2entwine: Gush 1.3

2005-02-01T23:50:00-05:00

Possibly the coolest looking IM client on the market, Gush 1.3 has gone final. Details of what's interesting in this release stashed elsewhere, though.

Anjewierden: BlogTrace

2005-01-31T23:57:00-05:00

Through Lilia Efimova, I knew what Anjo Anjewierden was up to regarding visualizing blog content. When she was in town Lilia showed me Anjo's BlogTrace application, the subject of two papers. I've been hacking away at a similar concept, called a BlogScape, that's a little lighter on the analysis, although long term I'd like to incorporate many of Anjo's ideas. Here's to either a little friendly competition or enlightened collaboration.

One thing that's obvious, getting this to scale up to lots of blogs and webfeeds is going to take a lot of work.

Porter: Exploding Newsroom

2005-01-24T23:49:00-05:00

Tim Porter, over at API Mediacenter's morph weblog, has six good ideas for blowing up the newsroom. The only faulty bit is the final question: Who among the traditional newsrooms is going to lead us into tomorrow by being the rule-breaker of today?.

Change will come from the margins and the outside, c.f. the comments on Porter's post. Look to the Lawrence.coms of the world.

Logan & Clementson: Longtime Lisping

2005-01-22T18:29:00-05:00

They may not be "old" for all I know, but Patrick Logan and Bill Clementson have been hacking with Lisp for a long time. A lot of their weblog content has been great recently, if you're into programming language design and implementation. Also, they have a lot of knowledge on non-obvious mechanisms for Web programming.

Clementson conveniently packaged up his 2004 best blog postings. As an example, check out his thorough discussion of programming Web applications with continuations.

Logan has been fighting the good fight, making sure folks know there are a lot of good ideas in those obscure dynamic languages.

Wyman: 8 Mil Blogs Watched

2005-01-19T18:09:00-05:00

Bob Wyman is reporting that PubSub is watching 8 million blogs. About 4 million are active, according to him, although I couldn't quickly find a definition of active. Even more interesting is that the gap between number of blogs and overall output is increasing, according to this chart, and growth in output is relatively slow.

PubSub is a tool worthy of much more utilization and promotion in the blogosphere. Since it doesn't tie in neatly to publishing tools, the service, AFAIK, doesn't get nearly the press it deserves. But let's say you wanted to watch the entire blogosphere for links into BoingBoing, or heck, even your own blog, in real time. Where would you turn?

You might say Technorati, but they're only advertising 6 Mil blogs watched and they're trying to be a search engine on top of a watch engine. Plus polling RSS just isn't the right model for watching, even though PubSub does support such an interface.

PubSub might be the best kept secret for keeping an eye on the blogosphere.

NMH: Mic Checka 2.0

2005-01-18T23:34:00-05:00

One, two! One, two!

Is this thing still on?! Jeez, you'd think after two years I'd have learned my lesson and shut up by now. Time to re-blogscape myself.

To infinity and beyond!

Paquet: Filtering DIU

2005-01-18T23:29:00-05:00

Seb Pauquet launches a request into the lazyweb to put some reputation filtering on top of del.icio.us. The overall concept isn't too difficult to implement, the tricky bit is not hammering del.icio.us and getting your service blocked. As far as I can tell, to get the full effect (using all of a tags history) you'd have to scrape a bunch of del.icio.us pages.

This just highlights the maddening point that Joshua zealously guards the implementation and data of del.icio.us. As far as the UI goes, I enjoy his staunch position. Keep It Simple Stupid. As far as the data and APIs go, let a thousand flowers bloom. The nominal reason to deny access has been server load, prior miscarriages of usage, dealing with crawlers, stability, etc. etc.

I wonder if we're to the point that if you're going to build a web application, work on the Web services API real early if not first. Plan on getting hammered by people building bad, broken, wrong, and way cool applications on top of it. Your elegantly designed frontend is just gravy.

A little more thinking out loud. How big a group do you need for a del.icio.us clone to be useful? Someone's gonna come along and do an easy to install opensource knockoff, with an interesting API and standardized data import/export. Throw in an inter-delicious protocol and you'll have the Wiki story all over again.

It could happen!!

Chen: Technorati & Feedster? Dead!

2005-01-17T23:54:00-05:00

Provocative if nothing else, over at the monkey methods weblog Andrew Chen claims Technorati and Feedster are essentially dead ends as standalone concerns. The gist is neither enterprise is distinctive enough to avoid being swallowed by one of Google, Yahoo!, Amazon, or MSN. The most critical hit is that both engines have poor interfaces for actually seeing into that huge iceberg of content. If you claim to track the "news of the blogosphere" why channel people through a keyword search? In the comments, David Sifry (Technorati) and Scott Rafer (Feedster) obviously object, keying on "RSS is different" and their web services APIs.

I tend to agree with Chen. I honestly think that there are a couple of folks at each of the big boy's research labs who could, in a summer project, ride the house crawler and indexer to more interesting results on a large body of webfeeds. These side projects might not reach the scale of Feedster or Technorati, but once they internally figure a way to get something really distinctive out of webfeeds, then the mothership could swoop on the small fry just for the pre-existing database. Besides, I'll bet with Google and Yahoo engineers any day of the week. As Suw Charman pointed out, there's some nuts and bolts stuff that could use a bit of polishing.

Then again, maybe Technorati and Feedster have neato analyses internally, probably ad related, that they're keeping quiet. Besides I'm on record that Sergey and Larry should swallow Bloglines first.

Jastremski: OpenPhoto.net

2005-01-17T23:35:00-05:00

Link parkin': Michael Jastremski is building Creative Commons based archive of stock photography entitled OpenPhoto.net. Bunch of neat ideas bearing further investigation in the about page.

Hyde: Tag Calculus

2005-01-15T17:46:00-05:00

Ben Hyde has been on fire recently. His latest musings regarding URL micro languages and rich, beyond keyword, tag query languages speaks to what the tagged up future might look like. I'm sure somewhere the DB community has explored much of the potential query language design space, especially in the context of SQL. However, a lightweight, user friendly, Web query language would be interesting. Maybe a reduced or tweaked XPath could fit the bill.

Also, I'm in the same camp as Hyde in that I really use this space more as a lab notebook then as a vanity press. As I tell anyone who'll listen, the data model of timestamped posts can be used for a number of different applications, which is one of the major conceptual wins of blogging. There's some structure, but the model isn't so rigid you can't bend it to other purposes.

NMH: Tagging as Signaling

2005-01-15T17:07:00-05:00

Refining my earlier thought about tagging's secret sauce, tagging's popularity doesn't come from taxonomizing, it derives from signalling. By applying markers that can be monitored to media (URLs, photos) you can signal to other like minded folk the availability or applicability of that media, for a given community.

Technorati's tag search provides yet another means by which the signal is transmitted. Given Technorati's hig profile, tagging blog posts could become quite popular, but we'll need a better set of watch tools for exploiting the results. Here's hoping PubSub adds tag selection to their query language.

NMH: Bloglines Agent Redux

2005-01-13T01:26:00-05:00

I may have spoken a bit too fast in my pessimism regarding a script/agent that periodically grabs my subs, picks out the ones "kept as new", marks them as read, and then does something interesting with them. Looking at the Bloglines API namespace it turns out you get a marker for items kept as new. HTTP traffic snooping with Firefox reveals it's a pretty simple request to toggle the mark.

I'm sure there are some caveats, but it seems like an end of the day info hoover a.k.a. knowledge aggregator could be built.

NMH: DIU inbox back

2005-01-12T20:26:00-05:00

Happiness is getting your del.icio.us inbox back.

Herring: brog

2005-01-12T00:11:00-05:00

There's very little seriously rigorous blog research in my humble opinion. Susan Herring's brog, (we)blog research on genre, project was all over HICSS with good stuff. I have quibbles with some of their methodology, but at least it's clearly documented, the conclusions are argued from the data at hand and I could try to reproduce the results if I wanted to. Besides they have whizzy pictures!!

P.S. Tom Erickson and Susan Herring throw a pretty good mini-track at HICSS. I learned a lot and had a number of great interactions with folks like Jon Seely Brown, Dan Russell, and Jim Holland. Enough name dropping, eh!. If you can pony up the cash and time it's well worth the trip, independent of the location.

NMH: Knowledge Aggregation

2005-01-11T23:54:00-05:00

One issue I have with Bloglines is that I tend to mark items as new for further reading, commentary, or investigation. I could relatively easily post these to del.icio.us or put them in my clip blog, but I'm so lazy I don't want to even do that. Actually I blame it on the Bloglines clip interface which forces you through a popup dialog, a choice of where to stash the clip, and finally a confirmation window. Too much work!! Unfortunately, I have a big enough pile now of "marked as new" items that they actually make it hard for me to read with Bloglines. There's tons of old cruft intermingled with the new. Cleaning up is a daunting task.

I'd like to write a script that daily pulls down those tagged items, marks them as read, and in a blue sky world, fed them to a personal focused crawler. The crawler would do some clustering, context analysis, and automated search to build a compendium report for me. I'd pick it up the next day in my aggregator or stash it somewhere easily accessible. Call it knowledge aggregation.

This is only slightly more work than Findory, but maybe that little bit more semantic information (I really am interested in that post and here's some other feeds that I think are related to its source) might make a huge difference in finding relevant related stuff. And if search histories were programmatically accessible, hey more grist for the mill. At the very least the combo would help me separate my short term and longer term horizons.

The Bloglines API doesn't look very promising for making this happen. I'll keep digging, but combining post tagging, a web based webfeed aggregator, and a programmatic back end would be a big win.

NMH: Folksonomy Secret Sauce

2005-01-10T23:43:00-05:00

Fight! Fight! Shirky vs Rosenfeld in a folksonomy vs controlled vocabulary smackdown. Ha, ha only serious.

One bit left out of the discussion is a minor, but crucial, implementation detail. The vanguard tools, del.icio.us and flickr, let folks watch tags through RSS feeds. Frankly, I think most folks could give a hoot about building an emergent taxonomy. They like being able to easily tag their content and they really like being able to watch how others tag theirs. People are still anxiously awaiting the return of the inbox on del.icio.us.

Forget the whizzy new vocab, I'm all about finding the whizzy new content.

NMH: Hall of Fame Voting

2005-01-04T23:30:00-05:00

Just stashing a whacky idea I had out here while looking at the Baseball Hall of Fame mechanism for determining who gets in. The process is this 1) every player is eligible a set time after their career, 2) they have to get a certain vote percentage (75%) to get in, 3) after a certain amount of tries they're eliminated, 4) if they don't make a certain threshold they're immediately eliminated and 5) voters have a fixed number of votes each round the number of which is relatively small compared to the size of the candidate set.

This process gives every player who ever played a chance, yet trims the pool quickly, and let's voters revise their decision, allowing for some thoughtful consideration. There's also an aspect of competition as you can stay eligible for a while, but you'll be competing against later, fitter newcomers as well.

Could this type of process be applied to media artifacts in a social bookmarking system like del.icio.us? This would be useful for identifying the "hall of fame" posts and highlighting them somewhere. You could also take them out of the consideration pool, so folks don't have to see them over and over. Newbies might get automatically introduced to them. On a per tag basis, this might be quite useful.

Tricky bits: what's a vote and how to deal with voter fraud? And could it be applied to other media artifacts. Or individual, personalized media streams. Hmmmm...

NMH: Socializing Slashdot

2005-01-04T13:47:00-05:00

Just for Lilia Efimova since I know she'll catch this in her aggregator, I'm putting my HICSS Persistent Conversation Workshop presentation online. This was my response to Tom Erickson's request to think about how Slashdot might be redesigned to better support persistent conversation. The proposed changes are completely hypothetical and the whole presentation was mainly meant to spark conversation, not report results. Feedback appreciated, flames will be studiously ignored.

Merriam-Webster: Blog

2004-12-31T17:00:00-05:00

Merriam-Webster declared blog the word of 2004. Just one problem, they only have a noun form definition.

A colleague and I often joke about how "verbing weirds language", but the verb form of blog is what's really important. A new activity and mentality of personal, public, short form authoring has taken hold. Not just with words, but with photos, bookmarks, playlists, and listening lists. En masse, people are creating, ripping, mixing, burning, mashing, and blogging a new intertwingly mediasphere. Interesting times ahead.

Wyman: As I May Think

2004-12-30T23:02:00-05:00

With a few spare cycles, I enjoyed working through back entries of Bob Wyman's weblog. Wyman is the chief public face of PubSub.com. I particularly like how he tries to position PubSub.com as not a traditional search engine, although I find "prospective search" a bit tortured.

"Browse" is typically placed as the opposite of search, but I'm thinking "watch" might be more appropriate. And PubSub is one of the few, good, leading edge watch engines we have.

And just to be greedy I'd be all over any more technical details on how PubSub does that many matches.

Paquet: Commentlogging

2004-12-29T23:50:00-05:00

Seb Paquet captures a potential emerging trend: commentlogging. If I get the gist, folks are using del.icio.us to record the places they leave comments across the blogosphere, squirreling them away for later examination. This also helps in monitoring the overall discussion.

By itself, this is an interesting usage of del.icio.us, but combined with Robin Millettee's durl service for monitoring del.icio.us URLs, or conceivably PubSub, some second order effects could kick in. I've been a big whiner about the impoverished nature of blog conversation versus classic USENET, but this seems to hint at further steps down the slippery slope of centralizing conversation. I'm pondering whether there's any significant improvement or extension but haven't seen any glaring wins. Still this might be an emergening phenomenon to keep an eye on.

Only problem is, making del.icio.us the sole conversation server, polled to boot, doesn't seem like a good idea to me.

NMH: Webfeed Fetishizing

2004-12-24T11:47:00-05:00

I'm getting the feeling that webfeed aggregation is in for a big hype bubble this upcoming year. Vacuous buzzphrases like "the network is the blog" and "personalized information hypermarkets" are starting to get traction. Besides there's now a conference providing, "awareness, clarity, education, deal-making and strategic business opportunities surrounding the emergence of online media syndication".

Uh, yeah.

In the short run, webfeeds are creating more problems then they solve. First is the firehose effect. Frankly, current aggregators suck at ameliorating this problem. They're all a step backwards from Outlook or even a good USENET reader. Second, given that standard syndication formats make media more amenable to machine manipulation on the end user's behalf, advertising becomes severely threatened. Makes the monetization issue that much tougher. Not mention branding gets whacked with webfeed aggregators. Last but not least is the continued thrashing about regarding bandwidth issues. Currently aggregation can be seen as something of a screw for both publishers and readers.

Of course, during the upcoming chaos a few prospectors, and their suppliers, will get quite rich. However it will take a while for the real transformative value to emerge, sprinklings of the magic "social network" dust notwithstanding.

Barefoot: Rojo Thumbs Down

2004-12-23T10:59:00-05:00

Darren Barefoot reviews Rojo, a relatively new Web based webfeed aggregator that tries to leverage social translucence techniques. I've got a one word response: ditto.

I find my Rojo account particularly uncompelling, and I get off on this stuff. The stampede of folks asking me for invitations, not, might also be indicative of overall interest from netizens.

NMH: Long Tail Nuggets

2004-12-22T21:19:00-05:00

Nugget 1: I was subscriber number two on Bloglines to the The Long Tail webfeed. That was yesterday.

As of this writing, there are 124 subscribers. Two orders of magnitude in less than two days. It's not what you know, it's who in the network knows you.

Nugget 2: One man's Long Tail is another man's white noise.

Anderson: Mann, Wallace, Long Tail

2004-12-22T21:00:00-05:00

I just have to link to Chris Anderson's juxtaposition of David Foster Wallace and The Long Tail, simply because I love the referred to essay: E Pluribus Unum: Television and U. S. Fiction. The essay appears in the collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, an exceedingly mind bending series of essays, of which the eponymous one is ridiculously dense and convoluted. And one which I never finished.

Anyhoo, after reading E Pluribus Unum... you'll have a whole new perspective on TV. Suffice it to say my takeaway was that TV is an endless vortex of cooptation. TV culture inhales irony for breakfast and is essentially unassailable with that device. Rebel through conformity.

Haven't quite figured out what this has to do with the long tail though.

CiteULike: Cruising Along

2004-12-21T22:41:00-05:00

Richard Cameron's CiteULike, previously mentioned on this here blog, has been piling up new connections and new features. They can be read about on the developer's weblog. CiteULike is now tied into a number of archives, including arXiv and CiteSeer. A group mechanism has been added. For example, a couple of folks at Northeastern have been busy little programming language squirrels. There's also a weighted list view of users tag and author collections.

CiteULike points out how restricting the document domain helps in automatically generating semantic metadata. Every paper has authors, a publishing venue, publication date, etc. which can immediately become tags or taglike.

Best of all everything seems to spit out RSS. I wonder how much of it is captured by PubSub?

Anderson: The Long Tail Weblog

2004-12-21T13:14:00-05:00

Chris Anderson, of Wired News, nailed a book contract to followup on his Wired article about the long tail. This article, more than any other bit of attention, has popularized the concept that there's money to be made working the 80% of products/items that have miniscule sales/attention. Those long forgotten fantasies of Internet and Web infinite shelf space may be coming to fruition.

As is the case these days, there's an attendant weblog to go with the book writing.

NMH: Gaming Findory

2004-12-17T13:00:00-05:00

Previously I posited a Findory API for self-reporting, noting that there might be a problem with accuracy. This would be useful for allowing other tools to tell Findory what I read.

As I thought about this more, I realized it might not be a problem. If you give Findory crappy data, what do you get? Crappy personalization. Presuming Findory doesn't generate globally visible results that depend on social behavior, there's not much incentive to be inaccurate about reports.

FeedBurner: The Long View

2004-12-16T16:23:00-05:00

FeedBurner has announced a number of new enhancements. I was struck by the following comment in one of their feature explanations: "for some, the feed is becoming a first-class citizen in the world of content,...".

Blogs are the writing tool that helped birth Web syndication, but webfeeds are now an ecology unto themselves. An insufficiently studied ecology I might add.

NMH: pyxmpp and PubSub

2004-12-16T13:52:00-05:00

I spoke a little too soon about the difficulty of using Python for XMPP. While the pyxmpp package is completely devoid of documentation, I managed to USTL (verbing weirds language) my way to a prototype client that can connect to PubSub, get my subscriptions, and receive announcements. The design of pyxmpp is pretty easy to hook into, once you figure out what's what. And the entire kit and kaboodle is pure Python, which means any clients built on top of it should be cross platform.

Now back to fleshing out the remainder of a decent PubSub client. The major hurdle is adding support for subscription manipulation. After that, we'll be proceeding to some interesting hacks in watching the blogosphere.

Did I mention that a combination of PubSub and Gush is more addictive than crack?

Culture Online: History Headlines

2004-12-15T09:47:00-05:00

Britain's Department for Culture, Media, and Sport, commissioned History Headlines, a site that turns historical education into the task of editing a newspaper. Targeted at grade schoolers it's another demonstration of how online interactivity lets folks construct their own artifacts, rather than just consuming them. From the buzz on the Web the site seems to be a hit, and something a lot of media sites could learn a thing or two from.

Wonder what it would be like to have a good Department for Culture, Media, and Sport in the US?

Bosworth: Powerful, Sloppy Content

2004-12-14T23:53:00-05:00

Finally put the time in and read Adam Bosworth's Service Oriented Computing Conference featured talk. The piece reads more like a manifesto though, embracing the wave around semi-structured personal content, cheap syndication, and loose coupling as a positive humanist trend in computing. The piece captures eloquently, but not in a confrotational manner, some of the excitement around all of this "blog and RSS" stuff.

2Entwine: PubSub Query Language

2004-12-14T23:42:00-05:00

2Entwine's brief tutorial on the PubSub query language hints at the power of a real-time matching engine, basic query language, and push capabilities. With PubSub, you really can watch the conversation around your own or others content.

The only downer is that programatically, to tie into PubSub you need to use a protocol layered on top of XMPP. I spent a good chunk of this afternoon looking around for a way to conveniently hook in using Python, but only found promising leads, not four square hits. Maybe other XMPP/Jabber language bindings will work better, but that was a bit disappointing given the age of Jabber Publish/Subscribe.

idavoll looks like a viable alternative, but I've been trying to avoid the Twisted inhale.

Linden: Long Tail To Knowledge

2004-12-13T23:02:00-05:00

Just piecing bits together. Ben Hyde knocks the fetishizing of the long tail. All we know is that it's a jungle out here.

Meanwhile, Greg Linden succinctly encapsulates the core problem with aggregators. People have to do a lot of work filtering out junk.

My bridge between the two is that folks will gravitate to aggregator like tools to keep track of all that niche content. Think of all those sniping tools for eBay.

Here's the rub. If you want to keep an eye on the fringe, is there enough context to make Findory style personalization tools effective? If it ain't linked to, commented on, or subscribed to, how well can you index the content coming from a source? Failing that, the fall back is to have people sift. Back to ground zero.

Oh yeah, and that's only for news or recently changing stuff. Despite certain protestations about content from traditional sources instantaneously becoming fishwrap, it actually does have value long term. We just have to wait for the lens of history to sort out what's what. But our tool builders are thinking little in this direction, as far as I can tell.

HeyPix: Photo Sharing Beta

2004-12-13T22:40:00-05:00

The Web based photo sharing has gotten a bit more crowded with HeyPix. Looks like the key sell is around a rich desktop interface and good blog integration. They've got the obligatory developer's blog, but it's currently content-free.

Could be competition for Flickr but the Canadians have a pretty good head start.

PubSub: LinkRank Details

2004-12-12T23:25:00-05:00

I thought I mentioned PubSub's LinkRank earlier, but can't seem to find the post. In any event, thanks to BoingBoing, the topic came back onto my radar screen. In particular, the algorithmic details are available.

LinkRank doesn't rank posts but domains based upon weblog post links. Of course New Media Hack is way out in the long tail. The numeric formulas are interesting, since they don't follow the iterative approach that PageRank, and its poor imitators, use.

And just for the PubSub folks: http://psi.pubsub.com/20040413:linkranks:1

Crosbie: True Mobility

2004-12-11T17:45:00-05:00

Vin Crosbie, of Digital Deliverance, has been seriously following and using mobile data solutions for years. His consultancy generates revenue telling news operations how to exploit mobile computing and communications. He travels a lot himself. He takes this stuff really seriously.

So when he says road warriors can ditch their laptops, I believe it. Now I only wish he'd talked about who he buys cellular service from. I'll ping him and see if I get a response.

Update. Vin did get back to me. I think I'm cool quoting his e-mail, but if not I'm sure I'll hear about it and end up retracting it.

Like most Americans, I used the domestic U.S. carriers, which operate

CDMA or TDMA networks. But I got tired of having an inoperable cell

phone whenever I traveled while traveling outside North America. So, I

switched to T-Mobile, shortly after it had bought VoiceStream in 2000.

-- Vin Crosbie

Zawodny: Inbox DIU

2004-12-10T09:27:00-05:00

Cool idea from Jeremy Zawodny. Since your inbox probabably gets a lot of links, automatically turn the inbox into a mini-version of del.icio.us. Bonus points for tying back into the del.icio.us mothership and/or including your browser history.

Holovaty: Links via Feedster

2004-12-08T12:28:00-05:00

Adrian Holovaty is pushing the boundaries of kitting out Firefox again. He's written an extension which, for the Washington Post and NY Times, ships the current URL off to Feedster and places the results inline.

Cute! Although as he points out, you're at the mercy of the remote search service which is mildly problematic if you're depending on Technorati. Where's all that funding going anyhoo?

Steele: Serving Client Side Apps

2004-12-07T23:29:00-05:00

Oliver Steele makes my head hurt. But in a good way!! Hard thinking combined with clear writing, in depth and with saucy figures to boot.

Steele's piece on Serving Client-Side Applications discusses a wide range of design choices in distributing functionality in Web apps. Even better it helps place The Laszlo Toolkit in context.

Bosrup: overLIB

2004-12-06T23:37:00-05:00

Need to make link and image hovers dance using only DHTML? Erik Bosrup's overLIB makes it easy.

Hofmann: advas

2004-12-06T23:32:00-05:00

Link parkin': Can't judge the quality, but Frank Hofmann's advas, a (pure?) Python package for advanced search, might come in handy. Looks like it collects a number of handy things such as stemming, stop listing, and tf-idf.

NMH: Findory API?

2004-12-03T09:19:00-05:00

Just wishin. If Findory had an API for informing the service about what you've read, external aggregators and other webfeed/news applications could chime in. Obviously, this routes around Findory's front page which is probably an issue, but might help improve things like personalized search. Also, morons gaming the system, and the general unreliability of self-reporting, come into play.

Another way to approach this would be by using custom RSS feeds that link through Findory. Findory may already do this for all I know.

ASE: ChartDirector

2004-12-02T23:33:00-05:00

So I was extolling the virtues of matplotlib previously, but I ran into a roadblock. I wanted to be able to generate imagemaps for some plots. So far I've been stumped in trying to recover the mapping from data coordinates to image coordinates.

Enter Advanced Software Engineering's ChartDirector, a commercial plotting library/component, with bindings for a bunch of languages. Even better ChartDirector will generate an HTML imagemap directly from a plot. Beyootiful, although I'd actually like the raw coordinates for other purposes. But it's easy to reverse engineer that.

Relatively straightforward and inexpensive licensing to boot.

Nova & Ortelli: rss4you

2004-12-01T22:46:00-05:00

Nicolas Nova and Roberto Ortelli's project, rss4you is prototyping social navigation in webfeed aggregators, something near and dear to my heart. I ran across the project earlier, but since the site's in French I couldn't make sense of it. Their 2004 FOAF workshop paper rectifies that situation.

NSF: HSD Awards

2004-11-30T23:05:00-05:00

Earlier this year, a colleague and I took a flyer on a grant application to the National Science Foundation Human and Social Dynamics program. We were one of the (many) unlucky losers. Apparently it turned out to be a bit of a stampede.

The program managers have tightened up the submission process to limit the number of applications. They've also conveniently collected the HSD grant recipients in one place, with links to abstracts. It's an interesting mix of stuff, all over the map in terms of projects combining social science and computing. I do note though that no project really intersects computing, media, and social behavior. Northwestern managed to land two fairly large grants one out of the Economics department, the other Mechanical Engineering. Congrats.

Your tax dollars at work!!

Linden: Findory Personalizing Search

2004-11-29T23:22:00-05:00

On The Web, you are what you do.

Greg Linden reports that Findory is personalizing web, blog, and news searches. The personalization is based upon things you've clicked through on Findory. The deployment is still in its infancy, but this is a harbinger of the types of things that Google, Yahoo, Amazon, et. al. can do with possession of (accurate or inaccurate) profiles of your behavior.

If it turns out that these searches are better than straight, unpersonalized, keyword search, it could be the hook that entices people further into a service like Findory. Previously I evinced some skepticism that Findory could get enough click through info to build a decent profile. But enticements like improved searches could prove me wrong.

NU Library: In The Spotlight

2004-11-28T14:46:00-05:00

Shoot me! I didn't know the NU Library was running a weblog, "In The Spotlight", for major announcements. With RSS feed to boot!

Dash: MT & Photos

2004-11-27T20:59:00-05:00

Link parkin': A cornucopia of links on how to integrate photos and MovableType.

Via Anil Dash on the SixApart Professional Network.

Trapani: DHTML FotoNotes

2004-11-27T20:39:00-05:00

Gina Trapani has combined her ad hoc DHTML image annotation techniques with the documented FotoNotes format to create a DHTML FotoNotes Viewer.

Not quite sure what the license is on Trapani's code, but it's available. Between that and FotoBuzz there should be enough rope to hang onesself, with this stuff.

Merholz: Castells Lecture

2004-11-26T13:38:00-05:00

Peter Merholz did yeoman's duty taking notes on a lecture by Manuel Castells, given back in late October at UC Berkeley. The focus was on "Cities in The Information Age". It's taken me 3 or 4 reads just to digest Merholz's notes, much less the actual lecture.

There are lots of interesting nuggets, but I was struck by the numbers regarding the urbanization of the world, the continued importance of cities, the intertwingling of virtual and urban spaces, and last but not least, the two dominant models of building urban spaces. One, the Mexico City model, lawless, ad hoc informal construction of the metroplex. Two, the Barcelona model, managed urban development, with an emphasis on government development of quality public spaces.

Just a gut feeling, but the 'Net in general, Web in particular seem to be moving from the first model to the second model, except under purely, private commercial motivation, at least in the US. In the long run, this may actually contribute to a collapse of American leadership in technology innovation. Think of it as the malling of our virtual sphere. Not exactly a horrible death, but a slow slide into mediocrity.

Then again, I could be wrong.

Jones, Harrington, et. al.: Document Aesthetics

2004-11-26T13:22:00-05:00

Rochester Institute of Technology's Rhys Price Jones, Xerox's Steve Harrington, and a gaggle of folks, have been investigating visual design metrics for document aesthetics and intent. Independent of content, paper and online documents can be analyzed to understand the purpose that's being transmitted by the design.

More information regarding Harrington is on the Web, including links to two recent papers.

FotoNotes: Back To Life

2004-11-25T12:39:00-05:00

A Turkey day bonus. From some reliable sources, FotoNotes is decloaking and the long promised open source release is on the loose. I know podcasting is hot, but it seems to me the activity swirling around photos and photo annotation makes the scene ripe for explosion in 2005.

Memo to self: ease back on the L-tryptophan today

Janes: J

2004-11-24T23:06:00-05:00

I used to complain that there needed to be an open source base for pulling off whacky aggregator experiments. Blogmatrix J

Bulaong et. al.: 24in48

2004-11-24T18:05:00-05:00

Lia Bulaong's 24in48 project was a recent interesting social moblogging experiment. In a 48 hour period, 24 people in NY moblogged parts of their existence. I can't quite figure out if folks were given a mandate and/or if they had social connections, so the result is a bit opaque to me but a very interesting concept.

The grabber for me is that you can slice the results in multiple ways. The project only provides two, by person and by hour. All sorts of other whacky ideas get sparked in my head though. The images may have been GPS stamped. What about looking at the photos spatially distributed across a map of NY? If there are social connections between people and the photos somehow reify that, how about making the social network translucent in some fashion? A graph viz is the obvious first cut but there's got to be other interesting ways to show off the relationships.

Just thinking out loud.

Fletcher: Bloglines & Sleepycat

2004-11-24T17:54:00-05:00

Dusting off another post stashed in my Bloglines aggregation, Mark Fletcher discussed why Bloglines doesn't use a relational DB underneath. Sleepycat, longtime purveyors of fine Berkeley DB style, associative, key indexed database software, is the engine that manages Bloglines data. Similar to the way you can punt an RDBMS if you don't really need all of its persistence and transaction management, if you're not doing relational queries, you can drop kick the model, and attendant overhead as well.

NMH: Daily Me is Here

2004-11-23T22:42:00-05:00

"The future is already here -- it's just unevenly distributed"
--William Gibson.

Between Findory.com, PubSub, focused crawlers, social translucence tools, and webfeed aggregators, Negroponte's concept of The Daily Me is here. There remains a bit of gluing, spitting, and polishing to make it happen big, but it will happen. However, I don't think the apocalyptic visions of people tuning out common ground sources is on target.

As the tools get better, people will lock onto sources out in the long tail. Niche sources with small audiences. Tracking friends and family. Staying on top of info regarding media objects (text, photos, music, urls, auctions, searches) people are passionate about, but can't be covered by the mainstream press. Keeping an eye on community discussions where community is tightly knit geographically or culturally.

Daily Me tools wil be used to add and augment sources, not delete them. It'll be all about the changing stuff outside of the newspaper that people care about.

2entwine: FotoBuzz

2004-11-22T23:23:00-05:00

I've been throwing students on the shoals of Flash based photo annotation. Looks like the fine Flash experts at 2entwine may have taken care of the issue for me with the FotoBuzz viewlet.

And of course it's got that stylish, 2entwine look.

Via Anil Dash on the SixApart Dev Network, said post seeming to indicate that Fotonotes has come back to life.

Hunter, et. al.: matplotlib

2004-11-22T23:05:00-05:00

John Hunter and a merry band of hackers, has concocted a Matlab plotting library knockoff for Python: matplotlib. There are other nice Python modules for plotting: pyPloticus, Gnuplot.py, and disipyl. However, I can vouch for matplotlib since it's pure Python, works well, and seems to be an active project.

Whitman & Lawrence: Mining Music Metadata

2004-11-22T22:45:00-05:00

Via plasticbag is an oldie but goodie that's been stashed in my aggregator for a bit. In the 2002 International Computer Music Conference, Brian Whitman and Steve Lawrence describe a scheme to determine artist similarity based upon community metadata.

In a nutshell they take an artist name, ship if off to a music search engine, mine the top 50 pages for features using NLP techniques, and then cluster based upon the features. Evaluation is done using a "ground truth" of human compiled similarity lists.

An interesting approach to constructing context without much explicit, machine readable information. Parts of this are probably applicable to analyzing the blogospheres.

Cameron: CiteULike

2004-11-21T15:01:00-05:00

Richard Cameron (I think) has cooked up a del.icio.us like system called CiteULike that has a vertical focus: academic papers from the sciences (biology, medicine, computing). Need to kick the tires on this one, but I wonder if it restricts URLs to the listed academic paper sources?

This led me to another whacky idea regarding metadata gathering in a social bookmark service. del.icio.us doesn't do anything special with your bookmarks, while services like Furl.net claim to archive entire documents. In between, those two points a service could analyze the documents, they're probably in PDF or Word, gather empirical observations about documents, users, and tags, and display that to users for browsing and navigation. For example, start doing the CiteSeer thing and mining bibliographies, but now you have all this other social translucence data. If you limit the domain of documents referred to, then you can probably start to make some interesting inferences about relevance and importance.

CiteULike would be a nice service to tie together with Google Scholar

NMH: Decon/Recon textualization

2004-11-19T15:36:00-05:00

Following up on the previous post regarding the effect of aggregation, there's also another effect on author's content. The message is ripped from its original context and inserted into another context.

For example, "previous post" above makes sense if you're seeing that post in the context of my reverse chronological posts. If you get it in a webfeed aggregator, that might not make much sense.

A relatively straightforward and oft discovered observation. But when do we hit the point where people start writing more for aggregation than for the monolithic site. Or is good writing/content inherently aggregable (sp?). I don't actually believe that but it's an avenue worth pursuing.

Somebody should get out there and do the experiment of being just a "webfeed" author and skip the weblog stuff.

Porter: Aggregation & Navigation

2004-11-19T09:57:00-05:00

Joshua Porter elegantly discusses the tension between aggregation in general (search, webfeeds) and designing information architectures. In short, aggregation routes around home pages. Home page. What a quaint concept!

Maybe IA designers should start thinking of sites as rings, layers, semi-permeous borders? There may be an aggregation attractive fringe and then a less amenable core. Alternatively, ever page can be a "home page". Either way, thinking regarding the structure and interface of a site becomes markedly different.

MSR SCG: Raindrop

2004-11-19T09:46:00-05:00

Microsoft Research's Social Computing Group has a weblog entitled Raindrop. Not exactly fast moving, but I've met a few of the contributors in person so I'm waiting to hear what new they have to say.

Memo to self, ease back on the acronyms.

McIntosh: StreetJams

2004-11-18T09:42:00-05:00

Graffiti, photos, urbanity, free culture. What's not to like about Jonathon McIntosh's StreetJams.

UN: Cartographic Services

2004-11-17T22:57:00-05:00

Speaking of free content, the United Nations has a cartographic division that's providing a number of good quality, free maps. And their terms of usage are quite liberal.

Hat tip to Resource Shelf

USLOC: Newspaper Project

2004-11-17T22:40:00-05:00

Being deeply interested in social media, I'm always on the lookout for freely available media to seed projects. Our very own United States Library of Congress is embarking on a project to digitize a huge number of US newspapers. Fab-u-lous!!

Then good old US copyright rears its ugly head. It's not so much that there the materials might be copyrighted, it's that you can't know and can't find out. Until you make some money and the vultures start to swarm.

Anyhoo, the initial seed for the project is "Stars and Stripes", an old wartime US government publication. I have to imagine that's in the public domain.

Hat tip to Waxy

Scribbling & Kryogenix: DHTML Image Annotation

2004-11-16T09:11:00-05:00

Flickr's image annotation is neat, but relies on Flash for presentation. I'm not inherently opposed, but I've thrown a few students on the shoals trying to recreate it. They've mostly foundered on the rampup to learning Flash.

Gina Trapani and Stuart Langridge have come up with imagemap and DHTML combinations that have a similar effect. I'm guessing they're both a little easier on the learning curve, and much easier to generate programatically.

NMH: Blog Vacation Over

2004-11-15T23:16:00-05:00

Okay, I was little burnt out after getting sick, attending the CSCW social networking workshop, attending parts of CSCW, and throwing in a couple of lectures to boot. More about the workshop and conference later, but time to get back in the saddle.

An observation about the Web in general, and the blogosphere (or blogospheres as our President probably believes), in particular. They both suck for retrospection.

Suppose you have a link, or a blog post, and you want to get a picture of the history of that content over time. All you've got is the present. You can't ask Google , or Yahoo, or Technorati, for query results "from" a given time window, e.g. give me all the relevant pages for an old post of mine, but limit them to a year ago. Then you could start to build a picture of the time varying context of a piece of content and better understand where it fits in to the blogoshpere and how it got there.

Not much out there enabling content forensics.

CSCW 2004: Social Network Workshop

2004-11-04T22:42:00-05:00

David McDonald, Shelly Farnham, and Danyel Fisher put together a small workshop on social networks at CSCW '04. This will put me in some fine company, including that of one Barry Wellman, network analyst extroidanaire. Trip report late next week.

Carden: Processing Sketches

2004-11-04T22:35:00-05:00

I posted earlier about interesting things that might happen if more people blogdumped as Tom Coates did, and some nice visual examples of blogging behavior are coming out. After my post, Coates subsequently lamented that there wasn' t a deluge of interesting vizes, but these things are hard work! Heck, it probably takes a little bit of time to figure out his data format and then a good way to interanlize.

In any event, through the follow up work I ran across Tom Carden's processing sketchbook, a collection of interactive applets generated using processing.

Amazon: Simple Queue Service, For Free!!

2004-11-03T20:59:00-05:00

If you'd like to program a distributed application that has producers and consumers decoupled in time and space, you can try to use any of a bunch of off the shelf message queue services, open source or closed from the big boys.

You could also try to ressurect the glory days of tuple spaces. Good luck!!

Or you can sign up for an Amazon developer token and use their remotely hosted, Web services based messaging queue. No muss, no fuss, no questions asked, just queue away. The dang thing even has a REST interface!!

How sick is it, that the world's biggest bookseller is the world's best web services provider? Google's not evil, and Yahoo!'s rich, but nobody walks the walk better than Amazon. They don't strut about telling us how many PhD's they have or cooking up obtuse billboards as job applications. They just create and support interesting tools that people can really build upon.

I have to believe this is some scheme to get real world pounding on a core piece of their infrastructure, for relatively low risk and payout. Oh and if it really catches on, they can start billing to boot.

Okay, we'll ignore that ugly little 1-click patent wart there for the moment.

Linden: Findory Redesign

2004-11-02T11:29:00-05:00

Greg Linden announces that Findory redesigned and reworked its infrastructure.

A whole lotta movin' parts there. Pretty doggone brave in my book, but they seem to to have pulled it off. It would be interesting to hear the backstory of what their architecture did and now looks like.

NMH: Presidential Endorsement

2004-11-01T14:42:00-05:00

This year it seems the in thing, at least in the blogosphere, to make it clear who you're voting for, presuming you have a US vote. We're pretty much a politics free zone here, but in the spirit of being a full participant in this nascent media ecology, here are my thoughts.

In general, I'm inclined to vote Democratic. Last election I claimed that the two candidates were just different flavors of vanilla, or castor oil depending on your point of view. Boy was I wrong.

I feel the executive branch has failed many Americans in the past 4 years. Many more than it has benefited. While some problems were due to circumstances that were uncontrollable, many were failings arising out of poor policy and/or planning. The talents, faith, and lives of many citizens have been flat out squandered.

I have no illusions that Kerry will turn out to be a barn burner, but due to lack of execution, heck not even sticking to their own rhetoric (c.f. nation building, growing the government), this administration should not be returned for another 4 years.

So I'm voting for Kerry.

Cannasse: ActionScript Compiler

2004-11-01T10:03:00-05:00

One of the neat things about Laszlo Systems toolkit is the way it turns Flash into just a runtime system. Basically, you have a compiler for an XML and JavaScript like language, that targets the Flash player. Missing from the toolbox were components that allowed one to do really dynamic, highly visual, interactive elements ala processing. Granted, I didn't break a leg looking for one, but I did some extensive browsing through the documentation.

This just came across my del.icio.us transom, but Nicolas Cannasse has released MTASC, the Motion-Twin ActionScript Compiler. This is a command line application that takes ActionScript code and generates an SWF movie, again treating the Flash player as a runtime engine. Not exactly the same as Laszlo, but in the same spirit.

Two big wins. First, for those of us who are visual ide impaired, this gives us entree into hardcore Flash programming. Second, it serves as an examplar for targeting other languages at the Flash player. Think writing Flash movies in something Pythonic.

Apparently MTASC is open source and written in OCaml. Vive la programming du functional!! (Please correct my French.)

Glaser: HLCM Recap

2004-10-31T18:57:00-05:00

Mark Glaser recaps some recent hyper-local citizen's media efforts. This includes some guarded praise for GoSkokie.com. Yup, we never got over the sustainability hump, but hopefully with Medill's brand name on such a project other j-schools are legitimized to take a stab.

Also, GoSkokie isn't completely dead. I should note that a section of Medill students is now posting more traditional stories to GoSkokie. We'll see if that brings things back to life.

Coates: Blogdump

2004-10-30T22:18:00-04:00

Tom Coates is providing a complete archival dump of his longrunning blog. If a concerted number of folks do this, it could provide a lot of grist for blog tool developers. Think what kinds of interesting studies would be enabled by having clean captures of a significant number of the top 100 blogs, however you decide to rank them.

One of the issues that blog researchers looking to do empirical studies have is simply getting raw data, especially of a historical sort. Writing crawlers seems simple on the surface, but let me tell you, once you decide to scale to any significant number things get hairy fast. If you want to get full archives, you'd better have IBM class skills and resources.

The real scotcher though is redistribution. It should be obvious that if a researcher collects their own archives of publicly available pages for private analysis things are fine. If the copyright isn't clear though you could potentially get into hot water giving out someone else's content. Maybe there's enough Creative Commons sites out their though to make a start.

I wonder how the TREC folks get around this issue? I know they have a Web track and sets of data.

Anyhoo, coordinating the collection, verification, and redistribution of volunteered blogdumps would be a good task for some enterprising academic.

Henderson: Flickr Internals

2004-10-29T17:27:00-04:00

I'm sure having Cal Henderson around to make the presentation would be really helpful, and probably much more entertaining, but the PDF of his slides for a presentation on Flickr to the Vancouver Php Users meeting still has lots of crunchy goodness.

Having seen two or three of these slide decks from other compaines, I'm struck how these systems become polyglot so fast. In Henderson's talk, a template language (Smarty), a server page language (Php), and a systems language (Java) all make appearances. Not to mention good old HTML, XML, and SQL. Oh and throw in some Perl to help coordinate all of this stuff.

Slides hosted by Niall Kennedy. Received via some twisty path probably passing through del.icio.us.

And yet another vote for Php sucks, although I'm guessing it was tounge in cheek.

Rosenberg: Y! News Hax

2004-10-29T17:06:00-04:00

Over on the Yahoo! Search Blog, Jacob Rosenberg documents some searchbox tips for focusing your news hunting.

Searchbox as command line yet again.

Linden: Watch, Don't Ask

2004-10-29T12:52:00-04:00

A few days stale, but worth reading is Greg Linden's summary of why apps shouldn't ask people about preferences. A modern app should watch what they do and then divine the rest. I take it that doesn't mean "don't help people get things done", but don't ask them to explicitly rate stuff, or maintain preference data, or respond to repeated off task queries.

I think this is the direction Aggregator 2.0 will eventually have to head. For a number of folks, maintaining blogrolls and the generated flow just won't work. People who need to read tea leaves like business intelligence analysts, political operatives, public relations, cool hunters, etc. etc. I'm still working out the profile, but people who have to observe communications in fast changing environments where trusted sources may not even exist.

The trickiness is that some of what will be needed is social information. This leads to needing critical masses of people buying into new infrastructures. The only obvious way to do that is through Web interfaces and plumbing, which unfortunately makes it somewhat more difficult to watch what people are doing.

Wroblewski: Blog Sparklines

2004-10-28T21:21:00-04:00

Link parkin': Luke Wroblewski hijacks Edward Tufte's concept of sparklines and takes a serious stab at applying the concept to blog postings.

NMH: Rojo, Out of Box Xperience

2004-10-27T22:01:00-04:00

On a lark, I requested an account on Rojo.com through an e-mail address posted in Jeremy Zawodny's Web 2.0 summary on the company. In case you're a newcomer (apparently there's something of an upsurge in interested folks) I'm a bit of a webfeed aggregator nut, even claiming to do some research on supporting technologies. So joining Rojo is a natural.

I'm planning on reporting in ongoing depth on my experience using Rojo, but I have to say the out of box experience was less than compelling. First, I took the default set of feeds for a new user. It's a large number, which isn't a problem, except that you have a ton of items in each feed, so out of the box a naive user is facing information overload.

My second issue has to do with the way social networking is integrated. In short, it's Friendster style as opposed to del.icio.us style. You have to invite people in as opposed to being able to easily see what other people are doing.

The interface does seem nice though. That might sound like small potatoes, but doing a good interface in a browser is no small feat.

The option A out of the box experience seems broken to me, though. I'm overwhelmed, not much of an obvious way to catch up, and I have to work to connect to people. I must admit that I am way biased as a webfeed aggregator power user and a Bloglines user to boot, so I may be just the wrong audience. But I haven't dug in, so all is not lost.

By the by, if you'd like a Rojo invite, send me some e-mail. No guarantees, but they do allocate a fixed number to pass out.

Update I'm out of Rojo invites. A recent (Feb 4, 2005) rush of publicity seems to have quite a few folks now looking for them.

Alexa: Web Services API

2004-10-26T00:28:00-04:00

Noted earlier, but link parkin' for now: Alexa Web Information Services APIs

Udell: Linkable Continuous Media

2004-10-26T00:17:00-04:00

Jon Udell posits some relatively plausible scenarios that could drive the growth of linkable continuous media. The ability to point at chunks of audio/movies from given offsets is severely lacking with current formats and players. Even worse is integration of the presentation of these chunks with other media, e.g. accompanying text. Podcasting and VOIP may be the drivers for improvements in this area. Of note is the connection by Real Networks' Rob Lanphier to the open source, Helix toolkit, which provides a hackable version of Real's player and server software and could form the foundation for making this easier. SMIL is the technical underpinnings of it all.

It'll be an interesting time when the world easily and routinely links into more than web pages.

NMH: del.icio.us Antisocialism

2004-10-25T19:57:00-04:00

You know what I'd like to see on del.icio.us? A way to filter out bookmarks into del.icio.us. I never understand why people need to bookmark pages of del.icio.us folks or tags. Just subscribe to the dang RSS feed!! Having an RSS subscription is just as good as a bookmark. Even better you don't have to visit the site manually.

Actually, I have a sneaky suspicion that these irritating urls start out as life in browser bookmarks which get exported/imported into del.icio.us.

Of course this is anathema to the del.icio.us way, but power users can wish can't they?

Metropipe: Linux USB VM

2004-10-24T20:28:00-04:00

Is that a GPLed Linux server in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?

I wonder if it's a Usermode Linux VM that somehow gets booted on the machine or a Windows application that networks into a remote Linux VM?

Via Josh Lucas

Torrone: Photo Mosaics

2004-10-22T13:29:00-04:00

Link parkin': How to make your own photo mosaics.

Via Engadget

Linden: Google In Big Green Country

2004-10-22T13:17:00-04:00

Greg Linden does a great job keeping an eye on Google visiting UW and opening an office in Microsoft's backyard. He posits that the move is an attempt to capture excess MS and Amazon talent. I'll also point out that it puts them near the UW CS department, one of the top systems departments in the land. A proximity that'll make it easier for student internships, joint research projects, grad student hiring, faculty consulting, and faculty defections to get off the ground.

Just a thought, but 20 years from now will we be talking about Google as the Xerox Parc for the Web era? With better management to boot?

NMH: Retrospection Tools

2004-10-22T13:03:00-04:00

Many bloggers have years worth of content they've produced, but where are the personal tools that help them take better advantage of it? I've link parked the same link multiple times. There are long running, latent threads in my archives that could be packed up and re-presented to me. Why isn't there some little agent that looks at my blog posts, picks out the urls, and hits up del.icio.us, Google, Alexa, and Yahoo, for related material. It doesn't even have to post it directly to my blog, but just e-mail it to me to jog old memories or add different perspectives.

The blogosphere has a supremely short event horizon. Mining the entirety of an author's or self identified community's past publishing is an area where someone could make some real hay. And with even more sociable media mechanisms for people to splice themselves into, there's even more grist for the mill.

Merholz: Tagging & Metadata

2004-10-22T12:51:00-04:00

Peter Merholz neatly summarizes the excitement around ethnoclassification, a.k.a. folksonomies, social tagging, etc. His contribution to the conversation is a call for system designers (del.icio.us, Flickr) to figure out a way to pave over the agreed upon and highly trafficked tags.

To add my 2 cents, as far as I know you can tag urls (del.icio.us), photos (Flickr), email (GMail), webfeeds (Rojo) and, slowly, blog posts. Someone needs to fix up the music players so people can start tagging tracks and playlists. Granted, this can be reduced to tagging urls, but the tags can actually be carried around in the audio files and playlists. Individual tracks might be too fine grained and too much work to be worthwhile, but tagged playlists would be fun!!

Red Sox: Greatest Comeback Ever

2004-10-21T00:10:00-04:00

Apropos of nothing ever posted on this blog.

The One Ring was destroyed.

The Berlin Wall fell.

The Evil Empire has collapsed.

And there was much rejoicing.

Jarvis: Exemplary Blog Discussion

2004-10-20T16:52:00-04:00

This one post on Jeff Jarvis' Buzzmachine, singularly illustrates why blogging is just horrible for tightly coupled conversation. C'mon, what percentage of people on Earth can and want to actually track a discussion that way, much less try and make sense of the spatially and temporally distributed fragments.

I grant that USENET is a bit of a mess, but it sure as hell got some things right.

NMH: A del.icio.us Observation

2004-10-19T12:37:00-04:00

Apropos of nothing, del.icio.us has zero egoboo. There's just about no way to distinguish one user from another other than by their bookmarking behavior. With the outbound link on the profile page, you can do a bit of namebranding, but that has little import for how good a user's link stream will be given the varied ways people use the system.

I wonder what an appropriate network growth model for del.icio.us subscriptions would be and whether the system actually conforms to it.

Veen: OSCMSes Suck

2004-10-19T06:56:00-04:00

As evidenced by the wastage of the comments, Jeffrey Veen launched a flaming Molotov cocktail towards an open source beehive. I can summarize his post in four simple statements:

Make installation easier
Write better documentation
Use CSS to make the design flexible
Push system administration to the background

There, that wasn't so painful now was it?

The open source part is a red herring which simply generated a bunch of noise. These features could be demanded of any cms. The real question to be asked is why commercial vendors haven't filled the void if open source stuff is really that bad.

Frankly, instead of starting with open source cmses, he might have had better luck seeing if wiki software would have been a better fit.

Levin: Social SW Distinctions

2004-10-18T23:32:00-04:00

A number of folks, including me, have wondered why the term "social software" has picked up traction, when there's a whole field of academic computing (computer supported collaborativ work (CSCW)) which encompasses just about every aspect attributed to the term.

Adina Levine is working on drawing out the interesting new features of social software. I'm still puzzling out if there's really something there, but elements ring true. For a half a minute, I'd bought into loose coupling but realized that many of the services cited (Technorati, Flickr) are even more centralized than USENET ever was.

Maybe what it boils down to is that these systems embrace the two aspects highlighted by Clay Shirky: first class group formation, and sociable media (my term). Anything else is just reaching.

Hat tip to Seb Paquet

Dubost: XWiki

2004-10-15T09:51:00-04:00

Trolling around in the backwash from Web 2.0, I discovered Ludovic Dubost's XWiki, a Java based Wiki toolkit with a programmatic API. Open source and GPLed.

CSIRO: Annodex

2004-10-15T06:45:00-04:00

The research arm of the Australian Commonwealth, CSIRO, has been working on tools for making continuous media of the web. Called Annodex it may be the solution to many of Jon Udell's issues with hypermedia.

Hat tip to Wesley Felter.

Google: Desktop

2004-10-14T09:24:00-04:00

You'll hear about it from a bunch of different places, but Google has released a, Win32 only, desktop application that augments your searches with local stuff. Hat tip to John Battelle, who has a lot of deep dirt on the release.

Mizzou JSchool: MyMissourian

2004-10-13T09:32:00-04:00

Via the Online-News mailing list, the Missouri School of Journalism is making a foray into citizen's media with MyMissourian. Looks very much like what we we're doing at Medill with GoSkokie except with more spit and polish, and as Clyde Bentley reports, more and better organized manpower.

While not busting out all over, it appears that journalism schools are at least giving their students an opportunity to encounter citizen's media. It may take a few crops of students, but eventually the viability of the concept should trickle up the management hierarchy.

Of note as well is MyMissourian's use of the open source Mambo content management system. As opposed to Geeklog, which is mainly a volunteer effort, Mambo appears to have the semblance of a professional development team backing it. As an example, the quality of the documentation is markedly different between the two. Also, since Mambo isn't specifically blogging focused it has a touch more sophistication in dealing with other media. Plus, as opposed to MovableType, Mambo is still both free as in beer and free as in freedom.

ONA: Final Keynote Panel

2004-10-12T09:40:00-04:00

Don't quite know what's going to happen at the Online News Association 2004 Conference super panel, but it should be entertaining. Panelists include (according to the ONA website):

Arianna Huffington, nationally syndicated columnist and former gubernatorial candidate
Joe Trippi, Howard Dean's former campaign manager, MSNBC commentator and author of "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised"
Mickey Kaus, Slate blogger
Jehmu Greene, Rock the Vote President
Dave Winer, Democratic convention credentialed blogger and organizer of ConventionBloggers.com

Maeda: Physical Language Workshop

2004-10-12T09:33:00-04:00

Media Lab projects are so tantalizing. Witness John Maeda's Physical Language Workshop, a follow on to the Aesthetics + Computation Group. The PLW is supposedly working on a project called the Treehouse Studio, underlying the OpenAtelier. The Treehouse Studio embodies a concept that's just about due: really nicely designed and integrated rich media authoring and management through the web. About a year and a half ago, I was talking about a similar project that had Alexa and John Seeley Brown involved. Bits and pieces are floating around, but I was hoping the PLW had made some major strides. Weblogs made text read/write for the Web, and photos are getting there, but there's plenty of strides to be made for other media.

What can I find related to Treehouse Studio? Not much other than year old pre-alphaish demos. No papers, no source code, no updates. The rhetoric on the PLW web page is great, but digging deeper all I get is vapor. Still I can hope that another hardy band of students, many of the current crop seem to have moved on, wash up on Maeda's shores and pull it all together.

Beckett: Open Semacode

2004-10-11T18:29:00-04:00

Spotted on the SmartMobs website, with Open Semacode, now you too can start building your own "Find Nearest Printer" application.

NMH: Doings at NU

2004-10-11T18:21:00-04:00

I normally don't pump The Firm's activities too much in this venue, but there's a few exciting developments that may be of interest to the 6.5 folks reading this blog.

First, our School of Communications is trying to build up the Technology and Social Behavior specialization. Justine Cassell and Eszter Hargittai are pushing things along, and the program has a fabulous speaker series for those in the Chicagoland area, or happen to be in the area on the right dates.

Also, NU is placing a big bet on the interdisciplinary study of complexity. The university has established the Northwestern Institute for Complex Systems (NICO). Not only is NICO hiring postdocs, they're also having a great seminar at the end of this month. Unfortunately, I'm not sure it's open to the public.

And if you want to know what it's like to be an intern in Medill's Global Program, check out the postings at the informal Global Program interns blog.

Boyd: Feed Culture Generation Gap

2004-10-10T18:32:00-04:00

Danah Boyd notes some contrasts between her observations of youth communication technology usage and the hype coming out of Web 2.0. There's probably a kernel of truth in her observation of a generation gap, but I'd counter that the Web 2.0 crowd, while important and influential, isn't the totality of computing. While those are the big money toolmakers, there's an element of youth culture out there that can make their own tools. Ultimately, I'm not sure if there's a problem here.

USC CNTV: IMD

2004-10-09T20:03:00-04:00

The weblog for the University of Southern California's (USC), Interactive Media Division (IMD) of the School of Cinema and Television (CNTV), looks like a winner. Continued regular participation from instructors and students on a number of interesting topics.

Putting some media back into New Media Hack.

Skrenta: RSS Penetration

2004-10-09T19:43:00-04:00

Speaking of Rich Skrenta and Topix.Net, he also revealed some useful numbers regarding how many online news sources use RSS. Looks like there's still a case to be made for screen scraping if you're trying to be comprehensive.

Skrenta: Topix.Net Internals

2004-10-09T19:36:00-04:00

Rich Skrenta provides a useful counterpoint to the LAMP dogma by exposing some of the thinking behind Topix.Net's implementation. In a nutshell, Skrenta says dump the RDBMS and stick to flatfiles. Be as dumb as possible.

I think part of the reason that the LAMP model is so pervasive is that querying data falls out of shoehorning yourself into the relational model. It's hard to design, implement, and optimize a data query language. Also, Skrenta discusses how to deal successfully with concurrent data access, which is another thing DBs like Oracle and MySQL buy you, although at the performance cost of complete generality.

Interesting stuff though and worth contrasting against Phill G's teachings. Maybe the flatfile guys need someone to write, or recommend, a book on the topic.

NMH: Stigmergy Applicability?

2004-10-08T23:08:00-04:00

Well over a year and a half ago, Joe Gregorio made a connection between the Web and stigmergic systems. I've been thinking about del.icio.us as a potential example of the same principles: many individuals being completely selfish, coordinating through changes in a "physical" environment, to create a complex physical construct.

Looking closer at the definition of stigmergy, I think the analogy is not apt. The concepts of stigmergy have two assumptions that break down with Web systems. First, conceptually any individual in a stigmergic system can modify any bit of the environment. Clearly, everyone doesn't have the right to modify any web page. Second, in all of the biological and alife examples I've seen, there's been a Euclidean space that constrains the actors actions. As a network, if you use links as distance, you don't have a Euclidean space.

These issues may not be showstoppers, but if you want to model action on the Web as a stigmergic system, the translation is not a one-to-one mapping. It may not matter though, as this meme has seemed to die out. Probably better off going back to games on graphs as I first encountered them in Duncan Watts' work.

NMH: Using MarsEdit

2004-10-07T10:05:00-04:00

Now that I'm back on the Mac, I get to use Brent Simmons' great stuff from Ranchero. That last post was made with MarsEdit, which is a really nice desktop posting tool. Now if it I could only get MarsEdit to let me set the "convert line breaks to paragraphs" option for posts, I'd be golden.

Coates: Folksonomy Interfaces

2004-10-07T10:01:00-04:00

Tom Coates does some interesting interface thinking in regards to tagging and folksonomies. Most of the thought process is in how to incorporate tagged bookmarks into Safari, some of which has already been done for Firefor. Coates mainly approaches the topic from the angle of Flickr's tags but of course del.icio.us makes an appearance.

The comments are also worth reading, although of course a librarian, archdata, shows up and doesn't quite get the spirit of del.icio.us. As far as I read the zen of del.icio.us, tagging is purely personal, but just happens to be in public. The goal is not to come up with some beautiful, efficient taxonomy that everyone can share. That's too much work to build and to use. del.icio.us is designed to be as simple as possible, to get as many people to use it as often as possible. Splendid chaos ensues.

One sort of neat idea Coates had was the construction of ad hoc social connections being created through local aggregation of individual folksonomies. Imagine if Rendezvous was used to publish people's del.icio.us URLs. On the fly interesting intersections of tags and tagged urls could be built and examined. Don't really know where to go other than that the notion of on the fly, ephemeral, social media spaces seems like an interesting are of exploration.

NMH: Magcasting

2004-10-06T07:27:00-04:00

Thought parking': wouldn't it be nice if there was a service that built a personalized, nicely laid out, collection of text and images culled from the blogosphere and dropped it off on your FooPod overnight? Audio's nice. Video doesn't float my boat. But something niche, tribal, and pretty for browsing in the interstices would be handy.

Zawodny: On Rojo

2004-10-06T07:06:00-04:00

Lots of interesting stuff happening at John Battelle's Web 2.0 conference. I think I'll sit back and cherry pick a few events to comment on post hoc. But Jeremy Zawodny's overview of the Rojo demo lands squarely in my wheelhouse. I'm a big fan of social navigation applied to webfeed aggregation.

Rafer: FeedsterTV

2004-10-06T07:01:00-04:00

Scott Rafer, President of Feedster, in response to my podcasting post, chimed in to point out that FeedsterTV already exists. Thumbs up on the existence proof, but it illustrates my point about herky jerkiness as this stuff is figured out. The Feedster enclosure meta feeds are neat, but the search doesn't appear to actually be limited to media feeds.

Kennedy: Alexa Web Services

2004-10-06T06:49:00-04:00

Web services bustin' out all over. Niall Kennedy notes that Amazon has updated it's e-commerce APIs and made Alexa site information available. Hat tip to Greg Linden

Here's an interesting study, maybe. Take a set of "popular" URLs. Say the del.icio.us most popular, run them through Alexa's stats, ship off to Google's API, check out some other social bookmark services, maybe even see if Technorati has any recent information and see what you get. Perform on a regular basis and build up profiles based upon a number of different sources.

Call it 7 habits of highly successful URLs.

Temkin: Open Source Laszlo

2004-10-05T19:05:00-04:00

Way cool. David Temkin, CTO of Laszlo Systems announces that their toolbox of multimedia goodies has been open sourced.

All I know is that there are a few smart MFs that work there. Lisp hackers in the Paul Graham class. Macromedia and Microsoft may get some serious competition in that rich internet app space.

Addendum: Not to mention P. T. Withington. Anyone who's worked on real time GC for money is simply a badass, despite being Crimson. ;-)

NMH: Back 2 Tha Mac

2004-10-05T07:09:00-04:00

I've really gone platform agnostic. Yesterday, on my office desktops, physical not virtual, I had a:

17" Apple Cinema display connected to a G4 Powermac
15" G4 Powerbook, booted as a passive Firewire drive
17" Sony CRT, connected to Dell Dimension, converted to a FreeBSD box
15" IBM Thinkpad T41

About December of last year, my Powerbook started giving up the ghost. Meanwhile, I was forced to buy a replacement laptop for one of my grad students, who subsequently didn't need it, ergo switch to Thinkpad as primary machine. In any event, I've been itching to get back to the Mac since NetNewsWire seems be busting out all over. And the malware situation on Windows is just really depressing.

Whelp, now I'm back in the Mac saddle. Best of all, I was able to dig up my license keys for NetNewsWire and LaunchBar relatively easily!! Yeehah!

Jarvis: Podcasting Hype

2004-10-05T06:38:00-04:00

While there are plenty of folks excited about podcasting, syndicating audio/video to portable media players e.g. the iPod, so far only Jeff Jarvis has succeeded in making the podcasting concept compelling to me. Partially it's his call to citizen's media, call it The People's Radio. It's also the acknowledgement that this stuff really isn't of the web. Sure podcasts are transmitted using Web technology. But their primary purpose, at least right now, is for offline content.

Hidden in Jarvis' post though is the reduction of these temporal media to URLs, the reuse of syndication technologies, and the potential for metadata. Basically you can pull all of the same stunts that are being done for URLs and text content. It'll take a while, but there'll be Feedsters, Waypaths, and Technoratis to take advantage of this ecology. Somewhere out there, a new Blogger and new SixApart are being cooked up (Webjay?) to make creating podcasts way easier. In the same way that Flickr seems to have wandered into a sweet spot for photos and the Web, the podcast groupies are fumbling about trying to figure out what works. Heck you could even imagine Topix.net and Findory style services. Eventually the big boys, Google, Yahoo, Amazon, will take notice and jump in.

For awhile it'll be a glitchy mess, concocted out of stuff we already know. Then the tools will start to peer into the media and things will get really interesting. I still think photos are the current frontier, but podcasting could be the next one.

Then again, I've been wrong before.

Andrews: BBC Newswatcher

2004-10-04T06:37:00-04:00

Robert Andrews documents the BBC's NewsWatcher, an internal Google News like service that automatically adds related links to news stories. This is a nice example of how a media organization can take advantage of syndicated content. While fraught with a number of hazards, e.g. playing up the competition, inappropriate links, etc., NewsWatcher style technology could help a news site add context without increasing manpower.

This could be especially useful if, as is increasingly true in the States, the news organization owns a bunch of properties that it would like to cross link. Now if Google makes Google News rebrandable, organization targetable, and privately web service accesible, they could make an offering to folks like Tribune Co., Knight-Ridder, NY Times, et. al. Don't know if they'd bite, but it could be another revenue stream.

MacManus: Content Authoring Fragments

2004-10-03T08:20:00-04:00

Richard MacManus carefully examines his personal publishing channels and notices a certain proliferation. I think this will be the short term trend for such services, as the Web works out what it wants. There's still a lot of task focused authoring, publishing and aggregation innovation to be had. Once users vote with their feet and focus on a small core set of services, then you'll start to see some consolidation. But that's a ways off.

The one common thread that seems to be running across these services is webfeed formats as data exchange mechanisms. Other than personal notebooks, all of the tools MacManus describes easily generate webfeeds. Even the private stuff, other than paper notebooks, could be made available through password protected URLs. While current aggregators are good at slurping and displaying webfeeds, tools like atomflow are going to be essential to stitching all this production together.

Price & Linden: Findory Founder Interview

2004-10-02T08:19:00-04:00

Gary Price conducted an excellent interview with Findory's founder, Gregory Linden. Lots of good insights into where Findory started, where it's going, and the difference between personalization and customization. I'm a big fan of Linden's approach to machine assistance. Don't bother asking users to do anything. They won't do it, or they'll do it wrong, or they won't keep information fresh. The only hope is that they'll buy into letting you observe their behavior.

One point I'll quibble with is that "old news is no news". This is an issue I have with a lot of personal information management systems. Retrospection is higher order thinking that could be stimulated by many of these tools. To the extent that old news is around, is filterable, and can be summarized, looking at old news can put current news in context. I think this is also an element of "finding what you want", where what I want is some deeper insight and perspective on a topic.

Thinking out loud and not completely in tune with the article but hey... What if someone wrote a set of retrospection plugins for a popular blogging tool, say Movable Type, that just analyzed the blog archives and presented overviews and visualizations of the flow, warp, and woof of the writing. Or in the Findory case something similar using my reading history to give me a sense of what I've actually been tracking over time.

Hedlund: Using Bloglines API

2004-09-30T07:07:00-04:00

Marc Hedlund's article for the O'Reilly Network provides a nice discussion of using the new Bloglines web API. Many people are really excited about the feed caching, item management, and distributed synching that the services provides.

What really floats my boat though is the access to the subscription information. With a blogroll management UI outsourced, new services can be built that just look at people's blogrolls. If a significant number of people make their blogrolls public, then new interesting social services can be generated. Share Your OPML 2.0 could be just around the corner.

FeedBurner: Amazon Splicing

2004-09-29T07:02:00-04:00

Also in yesterday's swirl of webfeed announcements, FeedBurner is supporting the usage of the Amazon Web Services API to splice contextual ads in feeds. This is of course why they're starting to think hard about licensing and splicensing as I termed it.

Pointer: paramiko, python ssh

2004-09-29T06:57:00-04:00

Link parkin': paramiko puts the SSH2 protocol in a Python module.

Could come in handy in a Python distributed system where you need to securely launch some processes on another machine.

Fletcher: Bloglines Web Services

2004-09-28T06:26:00-04:00

Bloglines has been cooking up some Web APIs to provide access to its data. Two of the major desktop aggregators, FeedDemon and NetNewsWire , have signed on to take advantage of the capabilities.

In my earlier post about the new My Yahoo!, I was about to say "lookout Bloglines", but they seem to be zigging to Yahoo!'s zag.

FeedBurner: Splicensing & Licensing

2004-09-28T06:10:00-04:00

The forward looking folks at FeedBurner are tackling the rather tricky legal aspects of splicing feeds together. This will be increasingly important as people try to integrate advertising with webfeeds. Note I'm ignorant/neutral on whether this is a good idea. The key nugget is that if you are seriously publishing using webfeeds, you better start marking your feeds and items with machine readable licenses pronto.

One of those issues I'm glad someone is thinking about, just as long as it ain't me.

Yahoo!: New MyYahoo!

2004-09-28T05:57:00-04:00

Scott Gatz announces a revamped version of MyYahoo! which plays nicely with the open webfeed ecology. Jeremy Zawodny puts the right initial spin on who the product is targeted at, and why it's important. Think Hotmail for webfeeds and not just webfeed aggregation, but aggregation of all the personalized/localized content Yahoo! has its hands on. Not to mention a professional UI team to top it all off.

This webfeed aggregation stuff is for real.

Sereno: Flickr Street Usage

2004-09-27T06:45:00-04:00

Bertrand Sereno hijacks Flickr's photo annotation to create an annotated visual recipe.

Photos are the next first class editable element on the Web. Prepare accordingly.

Carpe: Spurl on Furl Acquisition

2004-09-27T06:40:00-04:00

Over at PassingNotes, David Carpe (sp?) has Spurl founder Hjalli Gislason's reaction to the acquisition of Furl by LookSmart. Spurl and Furl are in that same social bookmarking pool as del.icio.us.

There's a few interesting tidbits in there, especially that Yahoo! is looking to get in this game, and that all the search guys are looking to build new relevance ranking algorithms on top of this stuff. Google is called a wildcard, although I might point out that Google already has a bit of a social bookmarking service called Blogger.

Janes: J

2004-09-27T06:26:00-04:00

For the longest time, I have been kvetching about the non-existence of extensible webfeed aggregators. Last week, while I was out of town, David Janes released J

Marlow & Ceglowski: upflux

2004-09-26T09:41:00-04:00

So I find this to be really odd. At the WWW 2004 blogging ecosystem workshop, Cameron Marlow (blogdex) and Maciej Ceglowski (blogcensus) propose and present a new, open, blog indexing service, called upflux. Even though the service is vapor, there is zero mention of it in the blogosphere.

Nada, zip, zero. Or at least that's what Google, Yahoo!, Feedster, and Waypath say. I'd ask Technorati but they're down again.

At AIR 5.0, after Marc Smith's presentation on netscan, a service that's been archiving, indexing, and analyzing USENET for 5 years, that an open blogscan would be great. That's pretty much what upflux sounds like. Too bad it didn't get any traction. Especially since there's all these folks constantly complaining about how bad or evil Google and its ilk are.

Or maybe things are happening behind the scenes and I'm just fishing in the wrong ponds.

Fry & Reas: processing

2004-09-25T21:37:00-04:00

A while ago, I ran across the processing language/environment while examining the computational art of Jared Tarbell. I didn't really dig into the tool Tarbell was using though.

Ben Fry and Casey Reas' processing toolkit is centered around a domain specific language for doing interactive 2D and 3D graphics. The language is layered on top of Java so has a relatively portable development environment and can even be compiled into applets. As far as I can tell, there's nothing really interesting from a language design perspective, but the authors provide some comparisons with other languages.

The point of processing isn't to be radical though. Instead, the language is supposed to be quite accessible to those who aren't typical programmers. I don't know the background of all the artists that appear in the online exhibition, but whatever their hacking abilities, the works are pretty impressive. Besides Tarbell's stuff, the whizzy zipdecode application making the rounds of the blogosphere was done in processing

I've actually been thinking that a similar combination of domain language on top of Jython with prefuse inside would be really neat.

Prinos: Iterating Python DB Results

2004-09-24T15:57:00-04:00

Link parkin': A nice little Python recipe, due to Christopher Prinos, for using Python iterators to fetch DB API results.

I picked this one up due to Simon Willison, although it seems to be kicking around del.icio.us as well.

P.S. Simon has a pretty neat trick with his blogmarks, click on one of the links and then revisit his page to see what I mean.

Johnson: Trailblazing

2004-09-22T11:19:00-04:00

Apropos of nothing, I always get a lot of book reading done when I travel overseas. Not only is there a lot of plane, train, and tube deadtime, Internet access (used to be) spotty, so I was off the computer more than usual. (Actually, for this trip I will mention how amazed I am at how well Internet cafes work in the rest of the world. Not only are they ridiculously cost effective for users, they seem to be a very low cost and accessible way to get into business. They're the high tech version of the corner store.)

Anyhoo, I just finished the part of Steven Berlin Johnson's Interface Culture, regarding Vannevar Bush and the Memex. Johnson picks at one thing that really hasn't come to pass in the current version of the web, trailblazing, or constructing sequences of links and notes. If there's any a need for a new Web datatype, and accompanying authoring mechanism, trails would get my vote.

This seems like something that could be relatively easily cobbled together out of bookmarklets and blog/wiki software. Throw in some folskonomy, a touch of proactive search generated from trail construction, and a dash of social translucence to move us one step closer to the Memex.

Oh yeah. A nod to Johnson for nailing the blogging and journalism connection dead on the head. In 1997 no less.

NMH: @AOIR 5.0

2004-09-20T13:42:00-04:00

If you're at AoIR 5.0 and wondering if this is the right Brian M. Dennis, yup you've got the right place.

If you're not at AoIR and wondering why I'm not blogging it, well one I actually like to pay attention in the sessions, and two the wireless access is a bit, uhm, lacking shall we say.

Satyanarayan and Bauer: MT Dynamic Publishing

2004-09-20T13:37:00-04:00

Arvind Satyanarayan and Elise Bauer have put together the accessible version of the details of dynamic publishing in MT. Combine with Brad Choate's overview, put in some reference elements (every detail of the Php framework) and you've probably got a halfway decent manual section.

Choate: Deepinaheart of MT

2004-09-19T15:27:00-04:00

Brad Choate digs into the dirty details of how Movable Type implements dynamic pages.

Just a thought, but it's a small step from there to doing your MT pages dynamically in Python. Ok. Maybe not that small, but it's an imaginable leap.

Janes: J

2004-09-17T06:58:00-04:00

NMH: Pluggable Web Apps

2004-09-17T06:51:00-04:00

Speaking of plug-ins, there could be some serious innovation in the weblog authoring space if someone married a really nice authoring plug-in mechanism with a good publishing mechanism. For example, Movable Type has a nice, clean well-defined way to create and add new template tags. However, historically there's been no accessible way to do that for the admin interface.

Oh sure you can get in there and change the admin templates or even write your own subclass of MT::CMS but from experience, I can tell you this is not for the faint of heart. Application callbacks are coming along, but still bleeding edge.

This raises a general question about Web apps kicking in my head for a while. Plug-ins and lightweight extensibility are pillars of modern computing applications. Think Emacs, BBedit, Photoshop, Half-Life, Excel, Apache, Firefox, etc. etc. We know how to make desktop and server applications load code dynamically and interface with it. What's the analog for Web applications? How could developers, pro and amateur, write their own Yahoo! Suite, Gmail, Bloglines, TypePad etc. plug-ins? Does this even make sense?

Sounds like something to ask Paul Graham .

2entwine: Gush 1.2

2004-09-17T06:25:00-04:00

Gush 1.2 was recently released. (Did I mention that Gush is the most gorgeous IM app?). Mostly this release focused on PubSub integration, but the 2.0 features look mighty nice. The Conversation Gems feature, pulling out and highlighting things like phone numbers, sounds interesting.

Currently there are only two extremely minor nits I have about Gush. One, I can't get it to work on my Linux box (I admit I haven't tried very hard). Two, no plugin architecture.

de h

2004-09-16T07:11:00-04:00

Bill de h

Battelle: New A9

2004-09-15T06:48:00-04:00

A9, despite being an Amazon company, is still a bit under the radar. That'll change a bit after some recent pr blitzing. John Battelle was in the pack covering the new face of A9. He's got a little history with Udi Manber though so there's some added value above reports from the other usual suspects.

A commenter on John's blog, counterbalancing the enthusiasm in the piece, pointed out that a lot of the search UI knowledge has been around for a while. (Aside: for any tech article, story, report, paper it's a truism that "Foo did that 20 years ago!"). I think John's piece missed one key element in focusing on searchstream capture. A9 is trying to be of the Web. No highly interactive features. No fancy Flash or Java. Just text, links, styling, and some Javascript.

Another submerged aspect. Searches becoming first class objects and interfaces appropriate for managing them.

And a toolbar! More chrome to kit your browser with, at least on Windows.

Media companies should take very serious note of what A9 is doing. I would think advances in how people search for product might be of interest to them and their advertisers.

Bauer: Pinning MT Entries

2004-09-14T05:52:00-04:00

When I read Elise Bauer's description of the MTEntry plug-in, I mentally screamed "That's what I wanted!!" relative to my recent complaining about pointing to singleton entries in Movable Type.

Oh yeah, her discussion of ways to make MT entries sticky deftly covers many options. If you're really into modifying an MT installation, her site should be tops on your list.

INFOMINE: iVia tools source

2004-09-13T06:35:00-04:00

Looks like a bunch of the INFOMINE project's tools released source about midsummer. As Soumen Chakrabarti advertised there is open source for an honest to gosh focused crawler: the Nalanda iVia Focused Crawler.

I'm starting a quick tire kick. It seems targeted at institutional libraries and is a touch bleeding edge. But hey, it's a potential starting point. Other than Filippo Menczer I don't know of anywhere else to get stuff like this.

Update: A January 2003 paper in D-Lib Magazine gives more context on the INFOMINE project.

Mike: The Face of Tomorrow

2004-09-12T08:31:00-04:00

We've been hack heavy here at New Media Hack, so to inject some new media into the conversation, check out Mike Mike's (not a typo) The Face of Tomorrow.

Take 100 digital headshots at one physical location. Get whoever you can. Composite, merge, transmogrify, those shots to create a statistical representation of people who pass through that space. Art ensues.

Low fruit extrapolations from New Media Hack: The Voice of Tomorrow and The Handwriting of Tomorrow.

Ruby: FeedMesh Starting Up

2004-09-12T07:57:00-04:00

When the world's dominant software company runs into a problem with the webfeeds for its developer network, lots of hackers go apeshit and start cooking up solutions. Sam Ruby reports on FeedMesh, a grassroots effort that broke out at Foo Camp to start building a P2P webfeed content distribtion network. Not a bad kernel of folks/organizations to start out with: blo.gs, Feedster, Yahoo!, and Bloglines.

The group has decided to initially focus on update notification distribution. There's actually enough working knowledge out there to just go for it, and try to knock out the content distribution problem too, in my humble opnion.

I wonder what would happen if a couple of big publishers added a few nodes to Coral and started issuing redirects for those feeds into that cdn? Presuming aggregators actually correctly honored HTTP redirects, publishers could selectively join as needed, aggregators wouldn't have to change much, and everybody would win.

Sounds too good to be true.

Update: The commentary on Scoble's posts is a quite entertaining microcosm of many technical discussions. Everything from, "of course it's broken", to "it was stupid server implementation", to "aggregators are implemented wrong", to "no it's not broken", to "we saw and solved all those problems in the 90's", to "let economic forces take care of the problem". And that doesn't even include all of the other weblog commenatary out there that's hard to round up in one place.

New Media Hack is of the opinion that they're all right and all wrong. Except maybe those who start off with, "the solution is simple". It always is if you only consider your perspective.

Choate: NMH RTFM

2004-09-11T16:16:00-04:00

After kvetching about not being able to directly refer to an MT Entry in a template tag, Brad Choate e-mailed to let me know that in fact there is a tag, <MTLink> , that does what I want.

Great, must have snuck into 3.11 when I wasn't paying attention.

What? It was in 2.64? Gack!!

I'll just shut up now.

Flickr: Photo Shows

2004-09-11T10:53:00-04:00

Between Flickr's photo shows and Laszlo's photoblox, slideshows are becoming of the Web.

NMH: Quick MT 3.11 Thoughts

2004-09-11T10:41:00-04:00

I recently did a new Movable Type 3.11 install for a project. Relatively painless if you've been through the process before, or are an experienced sysadmin. This version has improved comment management and dynamic page generation. I'm on record as being against using Php for MT dynamic pages, but it's sort of a neat trick how they do it. mod_rewrite and error pages are used to forward non-existent pages to Php. Then a Php library that reimplements the MT Perl API takes over.

As I said, I'm not a big fan, but I think this does raise an issue that's going to become more important in weblog tools and cmses in general. Allowing the smooth transition between statically and dynamically generated pages. There are all sorts of tradeoffs given the demands of popular vs unpopular sites, frequent vs infrequent authors, and sophisticated vs naive publishers. How do you design a gentle slope system that let's folks intelligently select parts of their site for dynamic or static generation?

Apropos of nothing, one thing about MT that really bugs me, is the inability to actually refer to one lone entry. Say you have one outstanding post that you'd like to refer to in a template. There literally is no way to do so using the MT template tags. Sounds like a useful plug-in opportunity to me.

Linden: Findory Heating Up

2004-09-11T10:20:00-04:00

I may have to eat my words about Findory. Greg Linden announced some new Findory features and growth at the company.

If I had copious spare time, I'd really kick the tires hard on Findory, Topix, and PubSub.

Harkins & Hilf: Building eToys

2004-09-11T10:11:00-04:00

Perrin Harkins and Bill Hilf thoroughly documented how eToys was built, using Apache and mod_perl. This is a detailed description of how to build a multimillion page view site, with a lot of good insights.

The kicker is that the paper was written circa 2001, about 3 years ago. And in fact, being a retrospective, many of the ideas had been deployed a bit earlier. Of course, a lot of it is reiteration of stuff Philip Greenspun wrote about. In any event, this is now pretty much mature technology.

Via Ryan Tomayko.

NMH: cliplicious

2004-09-10T07:36:00-04:00

I find that the majority of my post clipping, retaining posts for later perusal or research, is falling into Bloglines. It's close and convenient to the place where I do a lot of reading. Also, while I'm not taking advanage of it, Bloglines supports folders for your clippings. However, Bloglines clips only services posts in feeds I read.

del.icio.us is the tool of choice for plain old URLs on the web. This means I have two places where I stash Web info I care about. That's one place too many.

WIBNI Bloglines had a posting API for clips? I've concocted the following somewhat Rube Goldbergian solution, but I think it's relatively workable and efficient. I'll start using a tag clipz for URLs I want to stash. Then in Bloglines I'll subscribe to the clipz tag feed.From there it's one click to clip it. A potential benefit is that I actually have to review the tagged URL before clipping it.

The more interesting point is that I'm using tags to drive downstream processing. Of course it's me doing the processing, but the communication could later be with an autonomous process working on my behalf.

Turner: Tuning MT

2004-09-10T07:21:00-04:00

Neil Turner's "9 steps to a quicker MT3.1x installation" is about making a Movable Type installation serve pages faster, not how to get the installation process done in less time.

C'mon, tell me you didn't read it the same way.

In any event, I found the majority of the tips relatively obvious, e.g. excise lots of conditional parts of default templates, but there are one or two gems in there like trimming down .htaccess

NMH: Folksonomy Blog Wanted

2004-09-09T10:01:00-04:00

Thought parkin': Someone needs to start a blog to cover deployment of folksonomies in general, and applications like social bookmarking and photo sharing in particular.

Roberts: egoclip

2004-09-09T09:58:00-04:00

Yet another webfeed aggregator with AI inside: Patrick Roberts egoclip. No mention of how it learns to prioritize.

Interesting thought, will the adaptation be disconcerting due to variability? For example, I expect most people think the ordering of items in an aggregator has some chronological basis. If the aggregator orders on an opaque priority will uses be comfortable with that? Not harshing, just wondering.

NMH: Proact don't React

2004-09-08T07:46:00-04:00

Apropos of nothing, proact should be a verb so the above phrase would be proper English. Then again verbing weirds language.

I guess "proactive not reactive" will have to suffice.

Schachter: del.icio.us into MT

2004-09-08T07:43:00-04:00

Don't quite know what to make of it, but getting del.icio.us to regularly post into Movable Type, seems like a sweet hack. It's the marriage of one of lightest interfaces on the Web with one of the better Web authoring tools. MT is pretty lightweight, but del.icio.us already has about five different interfaces, three of which are tightly integrated with the browser (sidebar, right click, bookmarklet).

The combination may also help relieve load on del.icio.us since a bunch of functions folks have been asking for can be outsourced to their favorite local content management system, presuming it supports the MT API.

Going completely meta, someone could outsource the regular reading of del.icio.us RSS feeds and posting them into registered cmses.

Update: Gave Joshua his just due and put the second h in schachter.

Zawodny: Flickr's Cool

2004-09-08T07:26:00-04:00

Jeremy Zawodny has probably written the best capsule summary of what's currently making Flickr the bee's knees. Good commentary too.

It's not just you Jeremy, Flickr is now good stuff all the way around.

Photo sharing: next year's social software?

Fallon: seoradio

2004-09-08T07:13:00-04:00

Link parkin': seoradio.com produces and archives interviews with folks in the search engine optimization industry, those folks dedicated to getting web sites high rankings on Google et. al.

Nobody crucial from the search engine industry, to my outsider eye, but worth keeping an eye on.

Memo to self: create a linkparkin del.icio.us tag

Kalsey: Firefox is for Pros

2004-09-07T06:42:00-04:00

Recently, I started engaging in a bit of Firefox promotion. Adam Kalsey rejected the same offer arguing that Firefox is not ready for casual users. Subsequent commentary suggests that casual users aren't really the target of the campaign.

Frankly, I can see both sides of the argument although I think it's a good idea that the Mozilla/Firefox folks start getting their advocacy act together. Microsoft may be closing the current window of opportunity on IE's dominance, but another one may arise soon. Luck is opportunity combined with preparation.

Headshift: Benefits of Social Tagging

2004-09-06T12:03:00-04:00

Headshift, an English social technology consulting firm, teases some firm benefits of social tagging. Instead of, as many IA folks seem to do, latching onto how folksonomies (sp?) fail, they look at the glass as half full. Social tagging is one way to get some relatively reliable content classification out of a large number of people. Supported by a basic and uncontroversial official taxonomy, IA types actually have a hope of getting organizations to reveal their underlying classifications.

Graham: On Essays

2004-09-06T11:54:00-04:00

Paul Graham departs from his usual programming bailiwick to ponder, in a rather meadnering fashion, writing essays. The key is to go back to the roots of the definition of "essay", which I take as simply attempting to work through your personal hurdles.

Graham's advice is actually relevant for many creative endeavors in life besides writing. Pursue surprises. Work out loud, but be ready to revise your thinking. Start small to grow something big.

Work out loud. I sort of like that term.

Greenspun: Tenth Rule of Programming

2004-09-05T12:17:00-04:00

Apropos of nothing, just recording the origination and meaning of the following quote:

"Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp."

You can almost say the same thing about Web applications and the ArsDigita Content System.

Levesque: Web Framework Bakeoff

2004-09-05T12:10:00-04:00

Michelle Levesque is rigorously investigating a number of Python based Web application frameworks. She (presumably) has a well defined app that's being implemented in all of the systems, and is using CGI as a control. Still a work in progress, but I'm enjoying the coverage of Quixote.

I have to concur that Quixote takes some work to wrap your head around. One key lesson I learned is that every module or object must have a _q_exports attribute. A second lesson is that PTL is way cool.

Kalsey: 6A Musings

2004-09-05T12:00:00-04:00

Adam Kalsey is a pretty serious Movable Type developer. MT has gone through some recent upgrades and Kalsey adroitly breaks down who new features are aimed at: developers and businesses. He's going to be moving his raft of plug-ins to the new system on an as needed basis, essentially choosing a conservative path. He's right though, that SixApart has stopped innovating.

Frankly, no one's really innovating on the authoring and publishing side of blogging. We've still got the same crappy forms on the Web side, and there really aren't even that many desktop blogging tools. And since the trackback, name a new feature on the published page side?

Why: del.icio.us + Bittorrent

2004-09-05T11:50:00-04:00

Cleaning up some old tabs. Why The Lucky Stiff ponders integrating del.icio.us and Bittorrent. Sounds like a good idea, although as a del.icio.us user monitoring the system's development, creeping featuritis is perilously close. There are users demanding all sorts of things, many of which would detract from from del.icio.us's Zen like functionality.

Bayer: Myghty Nice

2004-09-04T19:40:00-04:00

About a year ago, I did a lot of noodling about with Mason, a Perl based templating system that has a lot of neat features. Like JSP, Mason compiles pages into executable code, Perl, and then runs the code to handle responses. Perl code can be easily embedded into templates, templates have a sophisticated inheritance mechanism, you can actually get at internal request data structures, and you don't have to restart the server to see changes to the templates. The only downside is that installation is not for the feint of heart. I also found Mason to be somewhat finicky if used with mod_perl, occasional hard to track down crashes and all that.

Having moved to Python, I've kicked the tires on a few page templating systems. Suffice it to say I was left pining for Mason, although Quixote is quite nicely Pythonic.

Enter Michael Bayer's Myghty, a knockoff of Mason in Python. Right now I'm giving it a test drive, and it feels pretty nice. Combined with mod_python it looks like you can have Python, flexible templating, access to server and protocol internals, and high performance all in one.

Benson: Life in LiveJournal

2004-09-03T21:54:00-04:00

Meandering about from Richard MacManus's strategizing about e-books, I chanced upon Erik Benson's discussion of why he gets more mileage out of LiveJournal, then broadcast publishing. SixApart's keynote for Blogtalk 2.0 touched upon this as well. There's a place, even big demand, for small scale communication tools. LiveJournal deliberately focuses on that realm and has built up a huge following.

Benson does pine for a more integrated toolbox, but I think focused tools, supporting narrow but universal interconnections, are the way to go. All the buckets Benson dumps content into, except for his paper notebook, can support webfeeds out and in. Add an integration toolbox, my mythical Emacs of aggregation, and the right tool for him could be built.

Webfeeds, UNIX pipes for Web 2.0?

WWW2005: Nov 4, CFP Deadline

2004-09-02T17:15:00-04:00

Two months and counting until full papers are due for the International World Wide Web Conference in 2005, located in scenic Japan. The track breakdown is entertaining , with lots of overlap to my untrained eye. Makes picking the right track for submission tricky, and will probably lead to a certain detectable inconsistency in the program. But I sympathize with the organizers who have to wrangle a big event at the relatively big end of the computing conference range.

Clarke: flickr.py

2004-09-02T17:07:00-04:00

James Clarke, a CS grad student at Sheffield University, has released a first cut of a Python module for accessing the Flickr API.

NMH: del.icio.us Phase 2.0

2004-09-01T23:44:00-04:00

With folks like Jon Udell pumping del.icio.us hard it was only a matter of time before the social gamers, a.k.a spammers, showed up.

Definitely straight out of the school of juvenile hacks, for grins I took a peek at a few user names that might be available, strictly for entertainment purposes. gwbush, georgebush, algore, johnkerry and billclinton seem available. Bill Gates was until I swiped it. I promise to use it for good. For a small fee ;-)

del.icio.us squatting, wave of the oughts!!

Nottingham: Python Dicts as API

2004-09-01T23:29:00-04:00

Mark Nottingham has been considering the usage of Python dictionaries as interfaces to computing services. First, obliquely, is the usage of dicts for navigating XML. Secondly, he's actually putting the Web in a dictionary. All right, so I'm a little late to the party. Sue me.

For the uninitiated, in most scripting languages it's quite easy to hijack the associative array/hash table syntax and hide other datatypes or procedures behind it. So for example it becomes easy to say something like web['www.cs.northwestern.edu'] to retrieve a Web page.

I did get a tad bit inspired and started putzing around with putting the del.icio.us API in a dictionary. No code as of yet, but the results look promising. Just to be a bit more of a tease, for another project, I combined dictionaries and Python's shelves for persistent storage. Putting it all together, I think there's a relatively elegant way to provide a Python module which makes accessing del.icio.us quite Pythonic, but also provides caching and persistence. The whole package would be very convenient for building friendly del.icio.us clients on top of.

NMH: Photo APIs & REST

2004-09-01T23:13:00-04:00

Of course I think the Flickr API is the bee's knees. Just as a challenge though, what would a photo management application that exposed itself using the Atom API look like?

I got sucked into thinking about this in considering how RESTful the Flickr APIs really are, especially in light of point 4 in Paul Prescod's Common REST mistakes. Prescod recommends avoiding putting actions in URIs which the Flickr API seems to do in spades.

The key feature I'm pondering is how to retrieve metadata about a photo. Two separate URIs would solve the problem, at the expense of increased network traffic and increased API complexity. It would be nice if the same resource/URI could be queried for different representations. Yeah, I know clients are supposed to specify this in the HTTP headers, but really how many folks actually do. He Hao's REST Web Services : Best Practices article indicates the potential for a meta query word, but then tags its usage as "arguably RESTful". Given the nature of the Atom wonks, my guess is that the spec is pretty doggone RESTful from the start, so one wouldn't have to worry about this issue.

Thinking out loud, an Atom enabled photo gallery system would be a nice alternative application to weblogs. Easy enough for mere mortals to understand what it's supposed to do, practically useful, yet probably exercising all of the APIs power.

Ceglowski: -1 Audioblogging

2004-08-31T20:29:00-04:00

Here's my six word summary on Macej Ceglowski's manifesto:

Audioblogging is not of the web.

But listen for yourself. Brilliantly executed and I totally agree. I'm not as fanatic about videoblogging, as video streams have the potential to have embedded links, which I think is the major lose of audio posts. Still, I think an even smaller percentage of people will be technically and artistically talented enough to make videoblogging worthwhile. Then again, we were saying that about maintining Web sites roughly 5 years ago and a cohort of crafty hackers came up with the right set of tools to really make it work.

Let me say there is one upside to audioblogging, the same one that radio has. It's quite easy to tune out the speaker and get some hacking done. I've punched up exactly one of Dave Winer's audio posts, and by about a third of the way through it had become pleasant background noise.

Funny sidenote. When I first clicked the MP3 link, all I got was silence for whatever reason. Given that Ceglowski needed 4 minutes or so to get his point across, I thought it also a nice homage to John Cage. I'm not sure it wouldn't have been a more devastating critique although too subtle for most of the blogosphere.

Dotzler: Firefox Badges

2004-08-30T23:58:00-04:00

Speaking of standing queries, somehow Asa Dotzler at the Mozilla Foundation, found me waxing poetic about the capabilities of Firefox. Really, all I do is ping blo.gs and Weblogs.com, and the latter is about to be booted as it slows down rebuilds.

Anyhoo I've been asked to add a badge or two, and I'm happy to oblige. Heck, the Moz Foundation even hosts the images for you. Like this:

The small one to your right will stick around for a while. Hey, if you use Firefox, and if you do I assume you have a Web site somewhere, why don't you pile on.

2entwine: PubSub in Gush

2004-08-30T23:38:00-04:00

I've been kicking the tires on Gush, mostly for the IM. Geez, it's a gorgeous app. There's also a webfeed aggregator baked in. Apparently they have some deal with PubSub.com, and to help grease the skids a bit, they have a primer on how to take advantage of PubSub's features.

I haven't really jumped on the PubSub bandwagon, but this howto reminded my of a latent thought I had. At the end of my CMS class, I gave out a few technology predictions. I went out on the steel limb and predicted that canned standing queries would increasingly be accepted as a new first class data type on the Web. Taking a keyword query, turning it into a URI, and than having that URI generate an RSS feed is the first iteration. I don't quite know how to fit such dynamic resources into the REST model, but once there all sorts of goodness would seem to ensue.

Just thinking out loud.

Canter: Flickr Love

2004-08-29T14:31:00-04:00

10 reasons to love Flickr, from Marc Canter. +1, especially reason #1: the Flickr API. To see all the Flickr API hot action, check out the developer's mailing list. There's neato stuff coming down the pike for Flash, Python, Perl, ColdFusion, etc. etc.

Glassdog: Aggregators Suck

2004-08-28T02:35:00-04:00

Glassdog's Ponyboy rants on lack of imagination in webfeed readers. Nicely supports the previous post. Any regular reader of this fine site knows that we here at New Media Hack are already so there.

The commentary against is of the usual sort. "Only infopornorgrapher's want that." "It's harder than it looks." "Put up or shut up." All of these points are valid concerns, but don't invalidate the premise. Emacs isn't for everybody, and it was one hell of a thing to build, but it makes a certain class of hackers better, who subsequently make lots of good stuff. An overall win for society. Plus, some of the fundamental design principles of Emacs, e.g. damn good regular expressions all over, embedded scripting language, have withstood the test of time.

While the Ponyboy's writing blaming the problem on inhuman programmers is quite entertaining, the whole dustup argues for a major experiment. If there was an Emacs of aggrgegators, 1000 plugins/flowers could bloom. Then we'd really find out what people wanted.

I think I'm starting to hone in on the real question underlying all of my recent ponderings. Once upon a time, I jumped on Awasu's bandwagon because they had a semblance of extensibility, but it never felt quite right. What is and isn't worth being pluggable and extensible in an aggregator? And then how do you design the aggregator to support that?

Various & Sundry: On Feed Search

2004-08-27T19:58:00-04:00

Jeremy Zawodny's sparked a blogosphere burst by musing about how the big boys have left webfeed search to little fish like Feedster, and Technorati, not to mention the "newsey" types like PubSub, Findory, and Topix. John Battelle has a nice roundup of the overall discussion, including a pointer to Rich (Topix) Skrenta's spin that the blogosphere is USENET 1.7 for better or worse. Comments on many of these posts are really useful as well.

Folks are fishing around for why this space might be big. It's dependent on a value proposition that gets lots of people into using aggregators. At that point users are providing way more personal information than just 2.x search terms. Also, aggregation provides a mechanism to deliver unsolicited information in a more personalized context, but hopefully without as much spam. And one bonus is that users are in browse mode, so a commercial interruption is not as devastating as when it interrupts the task focused drive (according to Jakob Nielsen) of search mode.

But there needs to be a demonstrated mass of people using aggregators. Enter Bloglines, best of breed web based aggregator, with a search engine baked in. Adoption of Findory, Topix, and PubSub also points to healthy growth. These guys are where the feed search story is going to really be played out.

I'll just throw in three other words that could make this really juicy for the geeks at Google, Yahoo!, MSN, IBM, etc. Personalized focused crawlers.

Doval: atomflow

2004-08-25T23:08:00-04:00

Diego Doval's atomflow is more than just a Java based, queryable, persistent store for Atom. It's a nascent and promising attempt at applying the UNIX philosophy to syndication and aggregation. Write one excellent, but focused, tool and then rely on the surronding integration atmosphere to put it to use. In this example it would be UNIX style pipes to connect things together, and thus melt away monolithic blogging tools and aggregators.

Doval's partners in crime, Matt Webb and Ben Hammersley, make the case more eloquently than I can. Of course the overall surface ideas aren't that new, e.g. Kimbro Staken's Syncato covers much of the same ground. The difference is that atomflow seems like a microkernel to Syncato's monolithic kernel, to use an OS analogy. We'll see if it has legs.

Kottke: Google Browser

2004-08-25T22:37:00-04:00

Engaging in some lightly supported speculation, Jason Kottke imagines a browser kitted out and branded by Google. Basically, they'd be stepping somewhat into Netscape's (cement?) shoes, but at least they have a bit of an enterprise background to give them cred, and some other business to fall back on. And if Google stayed away from calling it a product, IT managers could secretly adopt it as an alternative standard. Besides, a little browser competition is definitely Not Evil (TM).

Kottke even hypothesizes a browser based application suite. Not one consisting of the typical desktop suspects, but a Web-centric set including, search, e-mail, blogging, and IM. This is a bit heavier than my vision of each user tricking out their browser with smaller extensions, but the two are not incompatible. Even better, major advancements could be made if Google showed how to integrate every aspect of a the browser UI with serious global scale computing.

Actually, instead of an official endorsement, working on Mozilla/Firefox hacks wouldn't be a bad way for a few Google engineers to spend their hacking time.

Vander Wal: Folksonomy

2004-08-24T22:40:00-04:00

Earlier this month, a few information architecture folks got together and started discussing all this Flickr and del.icio.us tagging. In the process a cute little term, folksonomy, was coined. While it's really a noun, it seems to capture the spirit of what's going.

Folksonomizing would be trying too hard though.

I'm not sure the IA guys, quite get the point though. In these environments, there is no One True Taxonomy to bind them. Not only is it a 90/10 argument, it's The Web, so global coordination is out to start.

Brown PLT: MzTake

2004-08-24T22:27:00-04:00

I wonder if there's anybody left in Scheme land ( put away your knife, I know there is) other than the scattered remnants of the Rice PLT group? Still, these guys do good stuff. Sometimes the hammer guy can get pretty ingenious turning the world into nails.

Shriram Krisnamurthi's team at Brown University has put together a toolbox for program monitoring called MzTake. Pitched as a debugging tool, they've devised some primitives for announcing program events, and a domain specific language, FrTime, for reading and reacting to those events. FrTime can alter program execution.

Forget debugging!! This is an open extensibility mechanism. Imagine your browser or aggregator instrumented with a set of events, including UI behavior, that can be externally monitored within a convenient programming environment. All sorts of gluing and mayhem would ensue. Infrastructure like AppleScript and COM sort of support this, but they skimp on the event driven end of things acknowledging the fact that help is needed from the applications to start with.

Seriously, what if every application was written with MzTake style applications in mind? It might not be that far fetched in a world where logging is growing more popular.

Hat tip to Lambda the Ultimate.

NMH: 700+ posts & Comments

2004-08-23T23:50:00-04:00

The previous post was number 700. Not only do we here at New Media Hack own the term on Google, we own "media hack" to boot. It may be a very small pond, but sometimes it's good to be the big fish.

Take that Wired.

And since there seems to be a slight uptick in readership around here (7 to maybe 9), here's my thought on comments for this site.

Weblog comments are USENET done infinitely worse. It's like taking every thread and distributing it to a different host. With no protocol for monitoring and threading them to boot!! So you can't even read 'em in a halfway decent client. I don't have time to be constantly visiting your site and/or sifting through your comment feed to track a conversation. Although I agree with Phil Ringnalda that mouthing "get yer own blog" isn't sufficient as a solution either. And don't get me started on trackbacks although I thought they were sort of neat when they first emerged. Nor do I really want to deal with pruning comment spam no matter how good Movable Type, Wordpress, or any other blog tool gets at dealing with it.

Needless to say, if you want to engage me in a conversation on material on this blog, just send me an e-mail.

NMH: Pushback Monday

2004-08-23T23:33:00-04:00

What was that about "if you can't stand the heat?"

Dan Gillmor linked to GoSkokie. Hooray!!

This apparently set off those blog hatin' blokes at The Register. Boooo, trolls!! No excuse, but they caught the site at a particularly vulnerable moment, dog days of summer and all that. (Aren't all those folks across the pond supposed to be on holiday anyway?)

Also, Dave Ascher dropped private e-mail, mildly protesting my disappointment with his Dynamic Languages article. He rightly points out that to get CIOs and CTOs over the mental hump of adopting these languages (because of course all real hackers know the utility of languages like Python, Perl, Ruby, et. al.), new terminology and a new framing might do the trick. Maybe that could be a strategic initiative for these languages. Seeing how many Fortune X00 executives can be gotten to admit on record that dynamic languages are core to their business, and by how much. Bezos, Omidyar, Brin & Page, maybe get Sun on board, round up an IBM advocate, find someone at Apple. Then start working the big boys. For a while, in the Tcl community there was major effort to collect and catalog usages in the field, but this seems to have fallen by the wayside as these languages have become more popular in the open source community. Mainly, Ascher is rightly promoting a new era of advocacy.

My suggestion: just stay away from 4GL.

Okay, I'll admit that The Reg's headline was funny.

Medill: HLCM Report

2004-08-22T20:31:00-04:00

The student group that worked on GoSkokie.com made their report on hyper-local citizen's media available online (big PDF warning). The micro executive summary: "Hyper local citizen's media sites will proliferate whether traditional media organizations participate or not."

Note to interested readers. Medill's New Media Program has now conducted two hyperlocal capstone projects and two youth product projects. The projects have produced real results and have had real industry impact. For example, YourMom, an offering of the Quad Cities Times is a direct result of a capstone project. We're not quite up to the level of Lawrence.com, but we've got some decent expertise in these two areas. If you're a media company or journalism educator and looking for some hired talent, you could do worse than drop Rich Gordon an e-mail.

Disclaimer: I got a small acknowledgement for providing the hardware and some technical assistance in support of GoSkokie.com.

Sirota: FoxyTunes

2004-08-20T22:20:00-04:00

Alex Sirota's FoxyTunes embeds controls for a heap of music players directly into Firefox's user interface.

One area in which Mozilla/Firefox really has it over other browsers is the ability to actually extend the browser. Previously, in pondering Mozilla extensions for client side control of page display, I mused that Mozilla is way easier to extend than IE, but not trivial. Maybe the threshold is a lot lower than I thought. Even if they're not hard to write, they're a darn site easier to install.

Currently, I have my browser kitted out with the TabBrowser, Live HTTP Headers, and WebDevelopers extensions and I'm going to give FoxyTunes a try. And I'm probably an extension lightweight.

It's going to be interesting if Mozilla/Firefox ushers in a new era of extensible browsers. For a while there, toolbars and side bar development was really hot. Still could be in IE land for all I know. But think about potential synergies between in-page applications (e.g. Flickr, GMail) and in-gui extensions. While the browser might never become the MS killing platform of Netscape high times, there's definitely going to be some serious drag in moving to those rich media desktopish apps.

Sutherland: KoalaRainbow

2004-08-19T22:13:00-04:00

As if Movable Type didn't have enough whizzy plug-ins, Andrew Sutherland's KoalaRainbow provides a tag set that lets you query the MT data store and generate vizualization renderings.

My description probably isn't doing the tool justice, so check out some KoalaRainbow examples.

Udell: Video Citations

2004-08-18T21:44:00-04:00

Part of the problem with video on the Web is that it just isn't all that sociable, particularly due to the fact that it's hard to cite subparts of long presentations. Jon Udell has been a vigorous advocate for making this task easier.

In trying to help out David Ascher, Udell works through how to cite into RealNetworks streams. Not all that bad once you find out the stream's URL.

Elin: Open Source Fotonotes Volunteers

2004-08-18T21:38:00-04:00

Thinking about Flickr jogged my memory to check up on Flickr's progenitor, Fotonotes.net. The Fotonotes site looks a tad dormant, but Greg Elin had been threatening to open source his implementation, the protocols, and APIs.

Turns out the action is over on Elin's weblog, where volunteers are being taken to have a crack at his open source Fotonotes release.

I'd love to raise my hand, but I know just enough to know I'm at my project engagement limit. Maybe, I'll try my hand in mid-October.

Flickr: Organizr

2004-08-18T21:30:00-04:00

The fine folks at Flickr have released a new product: Organizr. The key bits are better browsing (time and tag based), photo collections (including custom presentations of photo groups) and users can define their own groups for social photo management.

Oh, and they plug their API right off the bat and taunt folks into doing something better. This in fact may be the biggest part of the announcement.

It's sort of neat to see the folks at Flickr reposition the company and still innovate. Remember when they first started, it was all about using photos to initiate chat. Now it's more about plain old photo management, integration with other Web publishing tools, and social translucence.

NMH: del.icio.us Repeating Links

2004-08-18T00:18:00-04:00

Being able to watch tags in del.icio.us is great, but repetition is a killer. Subscribe to the RSS feed for a popular tag and watch as the same link keeps coming over the transom. Overnight, I can have upwards of 60 links added to my inbox, many duplicates from the day before. I need another wrapper feed to collapse these guys!!

Next generation aggregation tools will need to have distillation and summarization facilities baked in. I don't think they have to be able to solve AI hard problems, but the interfaces need to be very good.

Speaking of wrapping feeds, wouldn't it be nice if del.icio.us tag feeds could call home, login as you, and check to see whether you've already saved and tagged a link?

Aggregator as platform again. Maybe I'll have to get one of those Web based aggregators and hack on it in parallel to my bloglines reading.

OAI: OpCit

2004-08-17T23:59:00-04:00

In reading the Library Groupware paper, I ran across the now defunct OpCit project run by the Open Archives Initiative. OpCit seemed to be a rigorous project to dig into electronic scholarly link analysis using arXiv as grist. Maybe there's some lessons learned in there for the blog search engines and social bookmarks crowd.

Chudnov, et. al: Library Groupware

2004-08-17T23:55:00-04:00

In Ariadne, a UK based digital library magazine, Daniel Chudnov and friends hypothesize the need for library groupware, tools that assist scholars in holdings and reference management. Cloaked in terminology I'm quite unfamiliar with, the essence comes to me as that future users will expect libraries to integrate Web authoring tools (weblogs, social bookmarks). The concept of a "link resolver" comes up and as far as I can tell simply refers to an electronic broker to deal with the fact that most major libraries not only have core holdings, but a lot of other complex access relationships. Therefore, where link traversal should actually wind up becomes a difficult question.

The paper does an excellent job of outlining some of the issues, but could have used some more technical meat for my taste. However, it looks like Chudnov has developed an open source del.icio.us knockoff called unalog

Heller: ctypes

2004-08-17T23:18:00-04:00

Thomas Heller's ctypes module for Python looks like a nice alternative to pre-processing wrappers like SWIG.

Mainly a thin layer on top of the OS facilities for loading dynamic libraries, with ctypes you don't have to go through the rigamarole of writing a specfication file, translating that file to glue code, and then building an extension.

The down side is that you don't get the signature checking safety net that glue code can provide. Ergo, it's much easier to shoot yourself in the foot, in a big way.

Udell: All Over del.icio.us

2004-08-16T23:29:00-04:00

Jon Udell is pimping del.icio.us hard.

When I guy with over 1,800 Bloglines subscriptions, not to mention an Infoworld column, pumps the hype on a tool things are looking up.

Memo to Jon. Get rid of the Google search box. That's so 2002

Webb: BLink Tagging

2004-08-16T23:28:00-04:00

Inspired by a presentation at Hypertext '04, Matt Webb mashes up del.icio.us, Blogger, and Technorati, in a brilliant loosely coupled scheme. The gambit would allow people to easily and freely tag links, ala del.icio.us, in their weblogs. A de facto standard attribute on a tags (maybe img too?) could carry the tags. Then Technorati, since it does the hard work of crawling all those blogs anyway, could stand in for del.icio.us: generating a front page of recently posted links or creating per tag webfeeds. Heck, they could even provide whizzier search than del.icio.us.

Minor note, Webb didn't actually toss Blogger in the mix. I just used it as a proxy for weblog authoring tools. Continuing in that vein, personally I'd throw Waypath at the task before Technorati. 7 days worth of del.icio.us isn' t all that useful.

Honestly, this scheme is just simple and useful enough to catch on. What it needs is a littlte fine tuning (e.g. what's the simplest, cleanest way to add metadata to links) and some evangelism in the form of "here's how to do it in your weblog tool," preferably with an easy to install plug-in. Knock out LiveJournal, MovableType, WordPress, TypePad, and some Java based blog tool, and you're probably 90% of the way home.

It's so crazy it could work!! At least until the tag spammers show up.

Battelle: Searchstreams

2004-08-15T13:40:00-04:00

I'd like some of what John Battelle is smoking late nights.

Searchstreams are what Battelle term the first class traces of focused searchers. The trail of links, queries, bookmarks, etc. that people generate on their way to actually finding information that they want. Tying back to Bush's Memex, Battelle makes a persuasive argument that embryonic searchstreams are already here, and that they will be a vital mechanism for making sense of information in the future.

I think he's right, but it'll be interesting to see how this plays out. In an ideal world, browsers would expose searchstream creation, editing, management, publication, and aggregation features. Bang! Cambrian explosion.

Web browser advancement is stuck though. So now you see bits and pieces of searchstreams escaping out in the form of Web applications, bookmarklets, address bar shortcuts, toolbars, context menus, et. al. This leads to somewhat haphazard innovation with uneven results.

Then again, maybe the second style is more in keeping with the Web's precepts and has a better chance to succeed.

Rasterweb: del.icio.us is neat

2004-08-14T13:28:00-04:00

RasterWeb agrees, del.icio.us is good stuff due to focus of functionality, clean design, an obvious API and no marketing.

In contrast to the other Web bookmarks competitors, del.icio.us smacks of good taste.

Kottke: Web Platform Noodling

2004-08-12T23:30:00-04:00

In responding to Jason Kottke's noodling on the entire Web as a computing platform, am I canoodling?

In any event, the thought that Google has built a world scale computer (and I like to think that Yahoo and MSN have as well, maybe even IBM), has pretty much stuck. But who's building the Web PC for the rest of us?

With a nod to Manila and Radio Userland, where are the consumer grade platforms that help glue all of those nifty Web services and standardized formats together? As a developer, why do I have to repurpose the LAMP architecture every time I want to build the next Bloglines, or del.icio.us? It's like programming with no OS.

And don't give me that Zope crap. That's like programming on the Amiga.

Bloglines: 100 Million Stories

2004-08-12T23:13:00-04:00

Cue Dr. Evil voice. Bloglines is reporting that they store and index one hell of a lot of news stories and blog entires.

I demand 100 million postings!!

Ascher: Dynamic Languages

2004-08-12T22:29:00-04:00

David Ascher of ActiveState, recently published an extended essay on dynamic languages. The piece was essentially meant as an update of John Ousterhout's classic paper on scripting languages. Ascher attempts to update the discussion in the face of the changing productivity and deployment demands for software development. We can spend more cycles on higher level languages that make programmers more productive developing Web and distributed apps.

Frankly, I found the essay disappointing for two main reasons.

First, programming language designers and implementors have been using the term "dynamic languages" for quite a while now. Granted it was all those old fuddy, duddy Lisp, Smalltalk, and ML hackers, but when the designers of the current popular crowd look to swipe ideas, who do you think they crib from? All Ascher's paper does is muddy the waters in an attempt to get away from a term "scripting" that isn't all that pejorative anymore.

Second, Ascher's definition of dynamic language mandates that the language be open source. This in itself is non-sensical since "open source"ness is a property of language implementations, not languages themselves. There's nothing that prevented Jython from being closed source. And has anyone seen the source for Microsoft's implementation of JavaScript in IE recently?

Open source, especially access to the source code, is a red herring for this discussion. Open access to the language design process is what developers really want. Scheme, Smalltalk, and Common Lisp all advanced without a "primary" open source implementation, although there were some. The key was that developers could experiment in their own implementations with new language features and then profer those as changes to the language.

An argument could be made that having a primary implementation actually hinders a language's progress. There's little chance radical implementation approaches and dependent design features, ala Scheme, can arise in something like Python due to the limitations of the CPython implementation.

Common Lisp will always be a dynamic language to me, no matter what anyone else says.

NMH: HyperLocal UI

2004-08-10T06:59:00-04:00

The following thought was inspired by a spate of bookmarklets and address bar shortcuts that have been recently generated for del.icio.us. The tipper was Ryan Tomayko's del.icio.us address-barlets and more importantly, his argument about muscle memory setting in.

Newspaper organizations should think of constantly providing boomarklets and address bar shortcuts as a service that ties local information to muscle memory. Advantages abound. Builds loyalty, or lockin if you prefer. You can get more information about users out of their bookmarklet choices and usage. Heck they can be custom generated. They're not malware and ridiculously easy to install (bookmarklets) and explain (address bar shortcuts). Developing them isn't even all that hard.

As of now, news organizations are completely ceding this opportunity to Web application developers e.g.: MSN, Yahoo, Google.

The tricky bit is to come up with services that users would want to routinely use. Coupon or classified lookup for comparison purposes anyone? There's gotta be something weather related in there. Arts and entertainment possibly.

Of course, online news sites would have to consider themselves also in the service building business, as opposed to just the content delivery business.

Just a thought.

del.icio.us: Personal Search

2004-08-09T22:54:00-04:00

Damn if it didn't sneak up on me, or maybe I was just oblivious, but del.icio.us now supports search on your own set of bookmarks. And of course, since it's a RESTful API you can do all sorts of useful stuff straight from the address/URL bar in your browser.

Ryan Tomayko has already put together a nice collection of del.icio.us shortcuts for your entertainment.

NMH: Different Feeds, Different Faces

2004-08-09T22:29:00-04:00

I'm on my third aggregator now (NetNewsWire, FeedDemon, Bloglines). All three pretty much present items as a big scroll. Despite some people's protestations, one huge pile of news isn't all that different than a bunch of big piles of news.

But the feeds in my blogroll are diverse, so why not more diversity in presenting them? For example, most of my feeds produce on a human timescale and rate; fewer than double digit posts per day. Then there are few firehoses: Engadget, (old) Scoble, Boing Boing. Now there are synthetic information streams like my del.icio.us inbox which can blow real humans out of the water. For the first category, wouldn't it be nice to have retrospective background information collected and constructed, just to provide context? For the last two categories, I'd like summarizations. Whiffs of AI-hard issues come to mind, but I think a little bit of topic clustering and temporal clustering would go a long way. Not to mention a bit of decent infoviz.

Oh yeah, and with photos pushing their way into syndication why not just tile a bunch of thumbnails?

In a current aggregator, as a first cut users could simply specify an interface preference with a reasonable default. Blue sky, next generation aggregators could adapt to the feed.

Wattenberg: Selected Research Projects

2004-08-08T19:38:00-04:00

Martin Wattenberg of IBM Research has executed an interesting array of research projects. To quote him, his work focuses on "visual explorations of culturally significant data." An offhand glance would place it in the infoviz bin, but Wattenberg's efforts intersect with math, art, and collaborative computing.

Hammersley: MovableType Book

2004-08-07T18:38:00-04:00

A Movable Type Gang of Four (Hammersley, Choate, Allen, Haughey) is working on a book, which looks focused on hacking and extending our favorite blogging system.

Interestingly, from what little I can make out of the mock cover, it's not an O'Reilly book.

NMH: Owning "New Media Hack"

2004-08-07T15:56:00-04:00

Despite a dead streak in early summer, and some name competition from Wired News, we here at New Media Hack are still proud to say that we've still got the top spot on Google for "New Media Hack".

No comments, no backtracks, no redesigns, no blogroll.

Just keeping it simple and stupid.

Bauer: Blog Market Analysis

2004-08-07T15:47:00-04:00

Elise Bauer does yeoman work trying to determine market share for various blogging tools. The methodology has obvious flaws, e.g. conflating Google indexed URLs with individual sites, but the relative shares of the various tools seem qualitatively in line: LiveJournal and Blogger on top, many other well known tools an order of magnitude less penetration.

Well, other than TypePad having twice the share of MovableType. That one seems a bit odd to me given how much longer MT has been around than TP. I'll profer two possibilities. One, WordPress really is putting a dent into MovableType's installs. Two, the numbers are also significantly capturing a usage factor, and the most enthusiastic and consistent group of posters could be on TypePad.

In the comments, Anil Dash asks for suggested improvements. Write a crawler that uses the Google API to generate a seed set, cluster URLs into individual sites, come up with some heuristics to identify the blogging tool, and let it loose!! For bonus points, do some activity analysis to determine if the blog is alive or abandoned.

This one will be kicking around the blogosphere for a while.

del.icio.us: Spawn of the API

2004-08-06T23:02:00-04:00

del.icio.us seems to be enabling a spate of innovative experiments. extisp.icio.us generates a map of a user's "tagspace". Buzz Andersen cooked up a Mac OS X desktop client for your social bookmarks. Delicious Mind is Ian Oeschger's hack to take your del.icio.us posts and, through a Java applet, turn them into a mind map. Not to mention a number of bookmarklets that provide more information before posting.

del.icio.us's REST API lends itself quite nicely to these types of explorations. The only major issue that I can see is that del.icio.us is pretty HTTP caching unfriendly. Cookies are always set and none of the useful HTTP headers are set. This makes it a tad difficult to write a truly friendly client and for now people are trying to be nice.

I wonder if the other social bookmarking services are seeing any of this type of hackery? Maybe I should just put this blog full time on the social bookmark beat.

Local Project: City of Memory

2004-08-05T22:45:00-04:00

Local Projects is a New York based design firm that seems to be specializing in interactive maps. Looks like they've done a number of interesting projects, oriented around allowing people to annotate maps with their personal memories.

In my work on the Encyclopedia of Chicago History Online, I'm trying to spread the meme of letting all comers, through Web based authoring technologies, be able to annotate primary materials, including many of the historical maps that are going to be included. Seems like Local Projects has some lessons learned that might be valuable.

Halavais: BlogClass

2004-08-05T22:29:00-04:00

Alex Halavais, University at Buffalo, is routing significant parts of his survey (?) media/communications course through his weblog. I find now that as a scholar, I'm gravitating to issues that are on his syllabus. Meanwhile, I've never gotten within spitting distance of a masscom class. So I'll be essaying to read up and chime in as much as possible.

Rumsey: Map Collection

2004-08-03T22:44:00-04:00

Jon Udell describes how David Rumsey was a hit at the Open Source Convention. Rumsey is making a large number of rare maps accessible through the Web instead of sending them to a museum.

The part that caught my eye was the use of a browser based image viewer that allows the digitized maps to be annotated with good old URLs. At the end of my CMS class this spring that soon (next 2-3 years) photos would become real first class citizens on the web. You'll be able to distinguish a photo URL from a generic image URL, pull metadata from photo URLs, and be able to manipulate photos through REST style APIs. Of course you can substitute digital image for photo, but the consumer camera market combined with explosive camphone adoption makes this a no brainer.

Too bad the image management, tiling, and viewing software that Rumsey uses isn't open source, as far as I can tell.

NewsIsFree: News Maps

2004-08-03T22:30:00-04:00

The fine folks at NewsIsFree are offering treemap based visualizations of news headlines. The News Maps are restricted to a few categories, but I can see how per user News Maps could be useful.

The caveat is that this particular implementation needs quite a bit of usability work. The tool tip style of navigation nukes way too much of the map context. Something subtler and in place needs to happen. Following an article completely blows away all context you had, either by opening a new window or new tab. There's a lot of small fragments whose potential is hard to guage. A lot of the navigation is menu based where the menu winds up taking a lot of screen real estate.

This of course is based on my in-depth, extensive, one minute evaluation. There may indeed be other usage patterns that are more important.

All in all a noble effort though. Hopefully they'll get a large user population and improve the interface. The ranking algorithm they use takes into account some interesting data, including how many people click through on a story.

NMH: FeedDemon vs Bloglines

2004-08-02T23:06:00-04:00

For whatever reason, Bloglines is really starting to eat into my FeedDemon attention. Part of it is that I have a Linux desktop at home and I use Bloglines as an alternative to all the Linux aggregators. None of them quite did it for me. The other part is that FeedDemon just isn't providing enough value add.

And besides, FeedDemon seems to be having severe problems with highlighting old entries as new. Everytime I come back to the Wired News feed, let's say, I'm told I've got 30 odd new items. Yeah, right.

Maybe there's a FeedDemon upgrade that fixes this.

Then again there may be no hope. One of the big reasons that Bloglines is really useful is that I'm mainly editing blog postings in a Web interface. Ergo, Bloglines gets a tab, the posting form page gets a tab, and it's easy to transfer links and clippings to a blog post.

Skrenta: Topix.Net New Features

2004-08-02T22:37:00-04:00

Okay it's mildly lame to point to John Battelle to talk about Topix.Net but that's the only place I could find Rich Skrenta's summary of new features at Topix. In addition to Gary Price's review, Findory's Greg Linden has a few words to say.

The key nugget seems to be a much more sophisticated NewsRank algorithm. There are also some UI improvements, and I'm just amazed at the number of sources and feeds Topix provides.

Oh yeah, Rich Skrenta, Topix's mastermind, is a Northwestern alumnus. Well before my time though.

Update I probably already knew this, but there is a Topix blog with aforementioned details.

del.icio.us: Purdy Redesign

2004-08-02T22:18:00-04:00

At least for my set of bookmarks the del.icio.us redesign is quite pleasing to the eye.

Linden: MSN Newsbot Review

2004-07-31T16:03:00-04:00

Greg Linden, founder of Findory News and Blogory, takes a closer look at MSN's recently launched Newsbot. Previously, I stated that Newsbot pretty much squashed Findory, but Linden's review indicates his product has more sophisticated algorithms under the hood. Ergo they still have decent prospects at carving out a nice niche. Mass acceptance is unlikely, but maybe MSN, Yahoo, or Google will swallow them somewhere down the road.

Previously, I've evinced some skepticism about Findory's chances, but I hope they succeed in the end. If they can make this stuff work I have to imagine the technology will find its way into webfeed aggregators.

NMH: Memo To Larry & Sergey

2004-07-30T01:11:00-04:00

Memorandum
From: Department of First Strikes
To: Larry & Sergey

We know you're still working on fixing e-mail, but first thing after the IPO, buy Bloglines.

Combine it with some of the smarts from Google News and make an aggregator that would get Scoble to switch. Laugh at Yahoo's My Netsca err... My Yahoo. Resuscitate USENET.

Cover costs with improved and increased Ad Words sales.

That is all.

BBC: Get Writing

2004-07-30T00:56:00-04:00

Earlier this year the British Broadcast Company launched Get Writing, an educational site on creative writing. The site features space for aspiring writers to save their works, learning modules about writing, and forums for writing discussion.

They even have my favorite ruse for focusing user activity: contests!! But they also reminded me of something else quite useful that I should have remembered from teaching: easily generated challenges which students can readily evaluate themselves against.

I wonder if Philip Greenspun baked any similar ideas into photo.net

NMH: Stupid del.icio.us Trix

2004-07-29T23:54:00-04:00

Memorandum
From: Department of Half Baked Ideas
To: Self

Tweak del.icio.us posting bookmarklet to ping the pingomatic. Have other services watch for our particular del.icou.us pings, and take action, e.g. archive current version of del.icio.us posts, or take a snapshot of the del.icio.us front, just for grins.

Mayhem ensues.

O'Reilly: Make Magazine

2004-07-29T23:47:00-04:00

O'Reilly is set to launch a combo magazine/book (mook) called Make basically geared towards hacking stuff. Too bad the term hack has been so soiled by the popular press. I'm sure that name came up during product development.

It makes sense for a company that has a whole series of "hack" books. In the fast movnig world of consumer electronics and communication the standard book cycle is way too slow. This let's them cut down on the latency. I wouldn't be surprised to see every Hacks hack (cough, cough) wind up being a Make contributor.

If successful, Make could spark another burst of technological innovation. It's been a while since the home hobbyist was front and center in computing. The Web has killed most of the niche technical magazines, yet isn't quite right for transmitting instructional details to a wide audience. A copy of Make could inadvertently ignite the next Jobs and Wozniak to noodle off into their garage and cook up something insanely great.

I think I remarked to J. C. Herz once that "we're raising a generation of kids that will expect everything to be moddable."

Readerhip Institute: New Reports

2004-07-29T23:08:00-04:00

The homegrown Readership Institute recently released a number of reports about the newspaper reading experience. Overall interesting stuff, but for online folks their recommendations for attracting younger readership through focused discussion and debate is particularly germane.

I was kicking this around with my colleague Rich Gordon for a bit and came to the conclusion that what's needed is a toolbox of "debate/discussion" widgets between the low bandwidth end of polls and the (too) high bandwidth open discussion forums. Sounds like grist for a class project.

Motorola: Broadband Everywhere

2004-07-28T00:57:00-04:00

Motorola is hitting the 300 Mbps mark with cellular technology.

Within 5 years, everyone will have a Parctab 100 times faster, and 10 times cheaper than Mark Weiser's that works everywhere in the world.

Of course, in analogy to Dorados and Altos, we'll have twice as crappy interfaces and be programming them in languages only half as good.

MSN: Newsbot US Beta

2004-07-28T00:43:00-04:00

The empire finally struck back at Google News with Newsbot. Well at least made the previously known beta more widely available.

Microsoft is bringing their search experts in to do neato whizbang clustering and topic identification. As a bonus, they'll track what you read, throw it into the magic collaborative filtering cauldron, and generate better results, both universal and personalized.

Too bad they just smooshed Findory, although it should be pointed out, Findory probably has a different set of sources.

MT 3.1: Bad Language Choice, Good Business Decision

2004-07-28T00:33:00-04:00

Movable Type 3.1 is coming out on August 31 allegedly. There are a lot of nice new features that make it even more useful, especially in news publishing environments. More plugin extensibility, subcategories, and scheduled posting are definitely a thumbs up. TypeKey and a limited user model still make fighting comment and trackback spam harder then they need to be.

MT 3.1 is also going to support dynamic rendering, allowing folks to trade off between fast, reliable, static pages, and whizzy, fresh, but slower pages.

Great! Except for the choice of Php as the language for implementing dynamic pages, at least from a systems design perspective. There's already a perfectly good scripting language, Perl, that MT relies on and has a beautiful API that the system exposes. Any of a number of Perl based dynamic page languages could have been added. I know Php is sweeping the nation, but I can't imagine this makes product management any easier. And besides, while I really try to be language agnostic, Php just seems poorly designed , through and through.

That being said, I completely understand the business logic. Tons of hosting services are Php enabled. The Web design crowd has taken up the banner. The language bears a surface simplicity that makes it seem more accessible than Perl. The engine is open source and actively maintained. It's basically a manadatory checklist item.

Heck, once you start down that route, why not just go to a pure Php solution?!

Outing: Ideal News Web Site

2004-07-27T22:41:00-04:00

Steve Outing has a number of recommendations for building the ideal news web site over at Editor & Publisher. They mostly seem like old hat to me since we've tried a bunch out in the New Media capstone project. The key underlying theme though, get quality community contributed content, is still one near and dear to my heart.

Herewith, my 2 cents worth.

First, fill the search box with local shortcuts. Yahoo! has them for all sorts of stuff, why not add shortcut keywords for "coupons", "restaurants", "bears" (if you're in Chicago). Sure you have sections and menus to indicate focused navigation, but this would be another opportunity to add features in a place where you know a lot of people wind up. Also, your regular local folks will learn this interface and the site will be stickier for local information.

Second, focus user contributed content efforts within time limited contests that potentially use archival material. Have a weekly, "This Day In...", contest where folks can tell stories around a set of articles and photos from the archives. In college towns, have photo contests for homecoming. Win-win, all the way around, and if you can't sell sponsored advertising on top of this, shame on you!!

Chroboczek: Polipo

2004-07-25T00:09:00-04:00

Need a caching HTTP server to put between the rapacious Web crawler you're running for the next great empirical blogosphere study? Think Apache and Squid are overkill for the task? Don't roll your own, use Julius Chroboczek's Polipo.

I'm just now kicking the tires but it's small, easy to manage, and seems to do what it says it does.

UMN: Into The Blogosphere

2004-07-24T23:51:00-04:00

A few weeks ago, the proceedings of Into the Blogosphere started making the rounds. I refrained from commenting since I hadn't actually read any of the papers. I've managed to work through a couple and here's the skinny from an unabashed techno, engineering geek.

You have to be heavy into communication theory for the papers to be relevant and even so I'm not sure how "useful" they are. Mostly they seem to capture tightly focused snapshots of how people use blogs, or how people are thinking about blogs. But not of them struck me as seminal. Not saying they're bad, just that I think the ultimate impact of this collection will be quite muted.

I don't know what to make of this, but there are only about 40 comments, for 20 papers. There were 62 del.icio.us bookmarks as of this writing and three grand citations according to Waypath (Not sure I believe that). Any of you folks out there actually read the papers?

Truth be told I found the University of Minnesota's integration of Movable Type into the academic computing infrastructure the big discovery on my end.

Carpe: Spurl's Gislason Interviewed

2004-07-24T00:00:00-04:00

David Carpe interviews Spurl's founder Hjalmar Gislason, revealing some of the philosophy that contrasts the Iceland based service with Furl.

Zachte: EasyTimeline

2004-07-23T23:27:00-04:00

Eric Zachte took Perl, Perl bindings for the Ploticus plotting library, devised his own special purpose plotting language, mixed it all up and out came EasyTimeline. The sample plots in the documentation are beautiful and apparently it's quite easy to add hyperlinks into the resulting images.

There are also Python bindings for Ploticus. A nifty programming languages class project would be to take one of the Python language toolkits and implement Zacthe's language or a different language design. One benefit is that you can readily see whether the dang translator/interpreter/compiler is doing the right thing.

Furl.net: User Effort

2004-07-22T22:52:00-04:00

So I signed up for a Furl account. Grabbed the "Furl It" link and threw it on my toolbar. Find an URL to furl and what happens?

I gotta rate the link, and think of a category to put in, plus maybe some comments, not to mention keywords, all in a popup.

Thankfully, there's a lighterweight bookmarklet, but man that's a lot of thinking to ask. Gotta say I like del.icio.us's clean and mean interface.Now I don't even hesitate to book mark stuff.

But I'm gonna give Furl some more time. I want to see how much of a win search is worth. Maybe I'll hack up a cron job to post my del.icio.us links to Furl.

NMH: Stigmergy, del.icio.us, blog indices

2004-07-22T22:34:00-04:00

Ran across the term stigmergy for the first time (sue me, I've been busy), in a John Robb post at Global Guerillas. Can't say as I'm really into The Global War on Terrorism, but the idea struck a chord in how to think about "communication" with social bookmark systems.

The term apparently comes from biology and the study of complexity generated by lots of simple creatures, ants and termites, using simple signals. Maybe this explains a certain fascination with del.icio.us as opposed to Spurl and Furl. The others are about information management while sharing and signalling seem to be secondary concerns. del.icio.us is all about those little signals and nothing else.

As a smaller world within the Web, social bookmarking strikes me as a sufficiently large, but not unwieldy, space in which to investigate some of these issues. Also, the arena is highly dynamic and a bit more amenable to automation then average Web crawling.

As to blog indices (blgodex, Technorati, Popdex) maybe their popularity (fading I might add) is a yearning for some kind of stigmergic totems.

Update: I don't claim any particular brilliance in attempting to make these connections. I'm sure a few have trod this path before me.

NYTimes: RSS Feeds

2004-07-22T22:08:00-04:00

The Gray Lady joins the parade and provides publicly available RSS feeds. I'm sure somebody somewhere has done it, but it would be interesting to have a collection of newspaper/news organizations with RSS feeds.

MacManus: Bloglines Sub Stats

2004-07-21T22:52:00-04:00

Bloglines, a Web based aggregator, displays subscriber #'s along with a feed. I don't know if you can get those numbers in a programmatic fashion, but Richard MacManus raises some interesting questions about how they might be used.

Predictably it's the thought of yet another ranking/indexing scheme for weblogs. Not that I'm particularly against them, but maybe one day new types of metrics and measurements. Stuff that would truly get at measuring influence.

Here's one off the top of my head. Think of each item published by a source as an impulse into the media network. Try to monitor the spread of that impulse, either through direct linking and/or trackback analysis. Evaluate sequences of items to come up with a moving average of "impact". This combination of measurements can reflect being in "the right place" in the network, centrality to network analysts, despite having few subscribers. It also dampens one hit wonders.

Of course having lots of subscribers can help you be connected to, and maybe even in, those right network places. But low flyers and emerging stars could still get their just due.

Holovaty: Client Side Browser Hacking

2004-07-20T23:53:00-04:00

Adrian Holovaty is a good guy. I even got the firm to fly him out here for a weekend.

Something tells me his Mozilla extension to fix All Music Guide is going to stir up a heap of trouble. It's your browser, but their content, so are you allowed to hack that last micron to your display screen? Lawyers are getting lathered up somewhere is my guess. Shades of Third Voice and it's ilk, the major change being that Mozilla/Firefox is much more easily (although not trivially) extended. If Mozilla ever retakes the world, look for a lot more hacks like this.

Fletcher: wingedpig.com

2004-07-20T23:31:00-04:00

Mark Fletcher, the man behind Bloglines, has a blog: wingedpig.com.

NMH: Quick Social Bookmark Tour & REST

2004-07-20T23:27:00-04:00

I took a quick tour of the social bookmarks tools mentioned in Clay Shirky's piece on social link management. Mainly, I was looking for two things, RSS out in some fashion, and an API in.

Surprisingly, most of the services had at least an RSS feed for an individuals bookmarks, and often a number of other different outbound feeds, such as most recently posted links. APIs were harder to find. Spurl at least tells you they have one although they have to vet you before they'll let you in on it. The rest were remarkably silent.

Then with a flash of insight, I realized they all have some form of bookmarklet for posting to the service, and often for accessing other additional features like all the goofily named gobbledygook that Dude, Check This Out! gives you. With a little reverse engineering, therein lies some semblance of an API. Given that it's written in JavaScript, it ain't gonna be SOAP or XML-RPC.

One other thing I also learned, services like Furl and Spurl (are these two twins or what?) add archiving of bookmarked pages along with good old bookmarking. This is something del.icio.us doesn't support. I can somewhat see the utility, although for me, it's not often the case that a 404ed link is all that useful, even if its contents are stashed. Different strokes for different folks though.

del.icio.us: User Tag Subscriptions

2004-07-20T23:06:00-04:00

Previously I stated that del.icio.us allowed you to subscribe to other users. Not only that you can subscibe to individual tags of a given user. Social connections can be made at a finer and more convenient granularity.

Flack, Lund, Hannay, & Tindill: Urchin Aggregator

2004-07-19T22:36:00-04:00

Urchin is a Web based RSS aggregator, implemented in Perl. There's plenty half baked takes on the same idea, but Urchin seems to have a nice clean logical design from top to bottom. Someone actually put some thought into how to build the backend of an RSS aggregator. In particular, it's DB schema was designed to cleanly represent feeds as RDF triples, and support the generation of RSS by querying the RDF store. Base modules have been speced to support ingesting any number of formats, while XSLT is used to generate output feeds.

Ben Hammersley gave Urchin a fairly positive review, although I would have liked to have heard if he actually put Urchin to use for an extended period of time.

At best Urchin could be the start of the aggregator platform I dream of. An extensible UI would have to be grafted onto it. At worst, folks could look at the DB schema for guidance on storage backends for RSS.

Waypath: Topic Streams

2004-07-18T18:22:00-04:00

Waypath chips in with some blogosphere innovation, a pre-alpha technology called Topic Streams. Looks like it's in the same vein as a lot of the Topic Tracking and Detection work, sponsored by DARPA, within the information retrieval community.

So innovation and build out in weblog related search seems to be picking up, but where's the new stuff on the authoring end?

A theory. For broad adoption, a weblog authoring innovation has to be browser based. Browser technology is really stuck.

There is one possibility though, some enterprising soul really pushes the integration of wiki writing with blog posting. When I say push, someone does the hard work of making this happen within a popular blogging tool like WordPress or MovableType, and polishes it so non-techies can deploy and use. Every blog post becomes its own wiki page, and a non-HTML syntax becomes used for authoring. This syntax then becomes extended with some features that people really get hopped up about.

NMH: stupid del.icio.us trick

2004-07-16T00:27:00-04:00

http://del.icio.us/inbox/user shows a user's subscriptions. For example, here's mine. It doesn't come in a nice structured format, so you might need to do a little screen scraping, but one could start building out an interesting network on top of this.

Note that in del.icio.us you can subscribe to both tags and users.

So of course, by beating the hell out of the service with a crawler, you could try and construct a global picture of del.icio.us. But more interesting to me would be how much social navigation is/could be generated using purely local connections. Other than the front page, there's not much of a shared global picture, by intentional design I suspect.

And just to add one meta level, you could monitor inboxes and generate RSS, so folks could subscribe to someone else's inbox and subscriptions. Basically, with a little effort, you can monitor a person's inflow and outflow.

Of course, Joshua Schachter has all the raw data at his fingertips too.

Feedster: 2.0

2004-07-15T23:47:00-04:00

I'd like to say it was my special wizzy blogdance/posting about innovation that caused all this hot action, but I don't think anybody out there is buying it.

Feedster goes 2.0. Sounds tasty, modulo the worst permalink in the history of mankind.

Flickr & Feedburner: Feed Splicing

2004-07-15T23:42:00-04:00

Back in the old days, we used to call this feed splicing stuff, wait for it... aggregation!! Sure it's a bit smarter than your average NetNewsWire or FeedDemon, but it's the same general principal.

Seriously though, this is a really cool idea, merging "regular" blogging and photoblogging, and one step closer to my concept of a photomesh. Also, the concept of being an integration platform for differing "best" media blogging tools is a winner. The sweetest sounding part of the announcement, pending execution, is the development of APIs and standards.

Next up, I'm guessing, splicing social bookmarks. Flickr photos have tags. del.icio.us URLs have tags. Hmmm....

Who says there's no innovation in the blogosphere!!

NMH: Merging Bloglines & del.icio.us

2004-07-15T00:10:00-04:00

Bloglines has a shiny new clip blogging feature, except it only clips items from your Bloglines feeds. del.icio.us works everywhere and seems like the right place to store all of this stuff.

Memo to self, turn clip blog into an RSS feed, then write a cron job to post new items into del.icio.us.

Shirky: Bookmarks Roundup

2004-07-14T23:51:00-04:00

Clay Shirky surveys the current crop of Web bookmark tools, noting that what's old is new again.

del.icio.us comes out at the head of the class. One thing that would be interesting to know, from a geek perspective, is what API, if any, these tools expose. I'm betting on a burst of action on top of del.icio.us's REST API, but I'm just ignorant of what the other tools have.

Time to do some digging.

Ogbuji: inspect + pprint

2004-07-14T23:32:00-04:00

Well ya learn something new every day. I didn't know Python had a wizzy inspect module for poking around in objects, classes, stack traces, modules, etc. Who knew?

Python, is there nothing it can't do?

NMH: Blogosphere Innovation Death?

2004-07-13T22:43:00-04:00

Is it me or is the "blogosphere", deadly dull, from a technology persepctive, these days? Name a new technical feature of blog tools/culture prototyped, announced, and widely adopted in the last year? I double dog dare yah!

Blog search engines? Feedster is sort of puttering along with nothing really exciting recently and reliability biting it in the butt. Technorati seems to be turning the corner on scale, speed, and reliability, but other than a couple of new indexes, anything to get the juices going? Related Technorati links? When's the last time you followed one of those? Besides, how useful is a search engine with a 7 day memory? You Waypath guys be quiet.

Speaking of indexes, anybody use Popdex, Blogdex, blogosphere.us for much of anything anymore? The HP iRank stuff has potential, but who besides HP, Google, MS, and Yahoo could implement it?

Photoblogs? Trackbacks? Old news.

TypeKey? Almost DOA.

SYOPML? Does it have legs? (Assuming it's actually still up)

Disabuse me of this notion by sending email to bmd at cs dot northwestern dot edu.

Tidbits: News Site Spin-off

2004-07-12T08:13:00-04:00

Poynter's E-Media Tidbits notes the launch of yet another youth oriented news spin-off, a combination of a print product and web site, that are different from the news organization's main paper and web site. The Lawrence Journal-World has been doing it to great success, and the last two New Media capstone projects here at Medill have followed a similar path. This is a trend to keep an eye on for a couple of reasons

First, these spin-offs look like they can actually be made attractive and profitable to a younger demographic. Even better they can serve as labs for news organizations to actually experiment with new Web techniques and technologies.

The spin-offs I've seen have been youth oriented (read entertainment), but a couple of segments that strike me as interesting would be a hyperlocal citizen's media product, and something targeted at seniors. A print adjunct to Silver Stringers should be a winner.

NMH: del.icio.us thoughts

2004-07-11T11:28:00-04:00

Part of the reason I fell behind on writing for New Media Hack, is that I've sort of fallen in love with del.icio.us, a social bookmarking tool that I've come to use more and more recently. As I've said before, del.icio.us isn't all that new as an application, but similar to my thoughts on Bloglines, the difference is in community scale. In addition, del.icio.us, also has a Zen like minimalism that carries over to its REST style API. del.icio.us's simplicity is limiting but freeing.

extisp.icio.us is the first hack I've seen built upon del.icio.us, but there's plenty more potential. For example, internally, del.icio.us could track link copies between bookmarks. The application also supports subscribing to other users. Collaborative filtering anyone?

Also, here's one of my patented half-baked ideas. Provide a calendar based interface on top of a person's del.icio.us bookmarks. Within each day, week, month, provide a global analysis of the URLs that came across the transom. Add some local analysis of the URLs an individual bookmarked to generate a tiny bit of social navigation. For bonus points, implement on top of a jazzy, infoviz toolkit like prefuse to make it sexy.

Anyhoo, there's probably a paper or two in there for some enterprising academic.

NMH: Full Content Feed

2004-07-09T14:56:00-04:00

If you'd like to read New Media Hack right in your comfy old aggregator, there's now a full content feed for you.

Bloglines: Redesign + Clip Blogging

2004-07-09T11:44:00-04:00

If you're into social software, webfeeds, aggregation and so on, you really should be keeping an eye on Bloglines, the premier Web based feed aggregator. They recently redesigned and made an effective Web interface even more usable. Just rolled the dang thing out, and everybody benefits.

Bloglines also added "clip blogging". You see an item in a feed you like, you click a button, it goes into a blog. Big deal you say, plenty of of aggregators can do something similar. Yeah, but they're not holding the data for tens of thousands of people. And since Bloglines owns the interface, if clip blogging takes off, they can start adding fun stuff like group clip blogs. I worked on a paper submission last year (rejected, wah) which posited on some interesting UI stuff that could be done in such an environment. The problem is getting enough people together to run a decent experiment. Well there's at least one place it could be done.

Bloglines: the Google of aggregation?

van Allen: Productive Interaction

2004-07-09T11:29:00-04:00

Philip van Allen's piece on interaction design for online news was sitting around in a Firefox tab for quite a while. I was just about to nuke it but instead dug in a bit. Good choice.

van Allen forwards a notion of "productive interaction", where interacting with media is not so much consumption as production. This has huge potential online where the ability to interact is so much greater than with paper.

What's being produced? There could be other media objects, or personalized configurations of a media space, or, at the highest level "sense". Through interaction, the user produces an understanding of the media, i.e. they "make sense" of the work.

Productive interaction as a design philosophy is proposed by van Allen as a way to get online news out of its current local maximum. News sites are starting to fossilize. However, productive interaction is somewhat perilous in that users can actually fail to produce what the author intended and it takes a lot of up front thinking about what the user can do. This will probably have to be explored out on the fringes of the media commons before the big boys even think of adopting it.

I'm not sure if there's really anything new here, hypermedia folks have been struggling with similar issues for years, but put in the context of news a little bulb went off in my head.

NMH: Wanted! Emacs of Aggregators

2004-07-08T12:20:00-04:00

All the popular aggregators are starting to look the same, and don't do much beyond supporting feed reading. I've probably said this somewhere before, but it would be nice to have an open, domain specific, scriptable (internally and externally) platform for slurping, slicing, and showing webfeeds and equally important meta information and analyses of these feeds. Much in the way that Emacs is not only a text editor, but a platform for building applications that do a lot of text munging.

Memo to self: find more round tuits.

OJR: RSS Fence Sitting

2004-07-08T12:14:00-04:00

About a month ago, OJR ran a feature on RSS in the news industry. The central concern seemed to be that if people used RSS to read the newspaper headlines, they wouldn't visit the news site home page, where all the ads are.

I don't know why, but this engendered the following stupid media trick. Differentiate your dang RSS feeds!! Think of RSS subscribers as a completely different, self-identifying audience for your content. Point towards different stuff. Add items with special offers, a.k.a. targeted coupons. Grab interesting stuff out of the archives and make it free for a time. Turn your feeds into a premium service for those who want more than the front page.

Just a suggestion.

NMH: Back To Life

2004-07-08T12:03:00-04:00

Okay, so I fudged a bit. I'm back to life for real. No more excuses. What's a month's worth of posting between friends?

NMH: Whew!!

2004-06-22T15:18:00-04:00

Looks like I managed to recover this blog, among other things, completely intact.

Didn't even have to break any URLs. All praise Murphy, Apache, Linux, FreeBSD, and MySQL.

In a stopgap version of this site I mentioned how the end of the quarter, two presentations, a paper submission, and costarica getting hacked put the kibosh on posting around here. Expect things to pick up a bit.

Lenssen: Context, Not Navigation

2004-05-27T23:11:00-04:00

Hmmm, I detect an emerging meme: categorization is dead. Google advertises that in gmail you don't have to organize your mail. The guest lecturer in my class on Monday, remarks on how categorization is too hard for users. And Philipp Lenssen documents a few other ways categorization breaks down, and by association navigation in general.

Lecoanet: TkZinc

2004-05-27T22:38:00-04:00

Zinc Is Not Canvas, it's a hell of a lot better than the default Tk Canvas.

Yee et. al.: Radial Tree Layout

2004-05-24T23:34:00-04:00

Yee, Fisher, Dhamija, and Hearst, a combination of Berkeley CS and SIMS folks, devised some effective animation techniques for radial tree layout, a few years ago. Radial tree layout is a focus+context visualization technique for showing graphs. The only place I've seen their methods show up is in the prefuse toolkit, but I'm not really deep into infoviz. Mainly parking so I can dig into the roots of radial tree layout.

NMH: goskokie.com redux

2004-05-20T21:38:00-04:00

One of the nice things about Medill's masters program is that one quarter is typically complete immersion into a project. 6 new media students launched goskokie.com on April 23rd. They've been adding features, generating content, pounding the pavement, and thinking up business models like mad. For less then a month's worth of time, those ink stained wretches have put together a damn good site.

While I've been doing occasional low tech troubleshooting on some plumbing, make no mistake they've done 95% of the hard work. One student could be considered a power user, but there's no hacker hiding behind the curtains. And this is a real live site, not a screenshot special.

Their most judicious decision? Selecting geeklog as a platform. Nominally a weblog tool, the dang thing has easily installed plugins for just about everything you can think of.

Munzner: Graph Layout

2004-05-20T21:28:00-04:00

Link parkin': Tamara Munzner's archive of her papers regarding layout for large scale graphs, espceially her thesis on hyperbolic layout.

Everett: Bloglines Mozilla Toolkit

2004-05-14T08:01:00-04:00

Hmmmm, could Bloglines become the aggregation platform I've been dreaming of? With a proper Web services API, interesting frontends can be experimented, including embedding within Web browserss, such as Mozilla. It's only simple notification, but Chad Everett's Mozilla Toolkit for Bloglines is a start. I may have to sign up with Bloglines just to kick the tires.

Six Apart: MT 3.0

2004-05-13T23:08:00-04:00

Link parkin: Six Apart's press release regarding Movable Type 3.0. Seems like there's a bit of a hubbub regarding licensing fees, but what I want to know is whether they improved the rather impoverished user model. MT 2.x didn't even support a notion of groups, much less assignable capabilities. I don't quite understand how you can go corporate without such mechanisms. Large groups and large #'s of blogs pretty much demand them.

Google: Groups 2

2004-05-13T22:53:00-04:00

Google is revamping Groups/USENET, with Atom feeds, amongst other features. Yes, syndication has come full circle and reinvented USENET, ... with HTML, ... and worse newsreaders.

Okay, having a kickass search engine for USENET is a win, but still, I miss my GNUS, sniff. (Northwestern IT whacked it's USENET server this year, losers).

JHU CER: Timeline Creator

2004-05-13T21:55:00-04:00

For my collaborative course in American Studies there's high demand for building interactive historical timelines into our Web site. There are plenty of instances, especially in Flash, on the Web, but I couldn't find tools to build those suckers.

After a bit of trawling, I've discovered a Java based timeline creator, freely available, from the John Hopkins University Center for Educational Resources. It's not the most visually polished thing in the world, but something's better than nothing.

Hyde: Learning Assembly Language

2004-05-12T22:34:00-04:00

Link parkin': Randall Hyde on "Why learning assembly language is still a good idea."

SLIS: XML Toolkit

2004-05-12T22:32:00-04:00

Acronym fu. Indiana University's School of Library and Information Sciences has an information visualization group, that's put together the XML Toolkit, software to do, you guessed it, a wide variety of visualizations, including graph visualizations!

No, the name is not a typo or a joke.

Perez: Java Graph Viz Compendium

2004-05-11T20:37:00-04:00

Earlier, I mentioned prefuse, a recently released Java graph visualization toolkit. Goonoodling around (I just made it up) following up a reference in the prefuse source I came across Carlos Perez' collection of Java toolkits for graph display. prefuse looks slick but it's alpha. These other kits are probably a bit more mature.

Flickr: Image Annotation

2004-05-11T09:30:00-04:00

Flickr has added image annotation, akin to Fotonotes, to the toolbox. Assuming some reasonable APIs/protocols to get at the photo annotation data, some social network wonk could have a field day investigating the Flickr community graph.

Tip of the hat to Boing Boing.

Update: More details on the Flickr update, from Corante Many2Many.

Jacobsen & Oberhumer: PycURL

2004-05-10T22:41:00-04:00

It's nice that the built in Python libraries for interacting with Web resources are so well done, but curl just takes the cake for comprehensive coverage of Web protocols and C level performance. PycURL wraps all that up and makes it dang easy to use from Python.

Lenssen: Memecodes

2004-05-10T22:38:00-04:00

Continuing in the slick hacks mode, memecodes is a wicked cool idea. Mutating, in the genetic algorithm sense, web pages based upon search engine referrals. Don't know where it's going or how it will work out in the end, but seems to be stirring things up.

Tip of the hat to Alex Halavais.

homokaasu: rasterbator

2004-05-10T22:32:00-04:00

I can't crack info regarding the sect of homokaasu to give proper credit, but the rasterbator looks damn cool. Apparently it takes a digital image and generates a wall sized version rastered out of smaller images. No indication of what the smaller images are though.

Now that's a Web service!

Stone: Blogger Reloaded

2004-05-09T23:55:00-04:00

Apparently, Google is actually working on making Blogger better. Biz Stone documents the major changes in the improved Blogger, most of which will be ho-hum to prosumer webloggers. Still, this raises the LCD for web authoring.

Someone should do a study of hosted weblogging services. There are probably about three to three and a half eras: EditThisPage, Blogger/Pitas/Manila, Radio Userland / MovableType / Trellix, TypePad and Blogger Redux.

Hmmmm, needs more thought.

Vogels: Cornell Epidemic Computing

2004-05-08T16:41:00-04:00

Manufacturing reliable and fast communications of purely local, epidemic style, information transmission, is a forte of Cornell CS research. Werner Vogels recaps some of the epidemic communication work done/going on there.

Now if Werner and crew can get around some legal issues and unleash Newswire on the world, we might see some thing new and interesting in RSS land.

unmediated: decentralized media

2004-05-07T23:44:00-04:00

Link parkin': unmediated, a group blog about tools and technologies that support decentralized media, might be worth subscribing to.

Reuters: RSS Feeds

2004-05-06T22:58:00-04:00

More grist for the mill, 12 news feeds from Reuters.

Heer: prefuse

2004-05-06T22:26:00-04:00

For all of us wannabe social network analysts/software builders Jeffrey Heer's network visualization toolkit, prefuse, looks mighty good. The demo applets actually run halfway decently, which is more than can be said for a lot of other gui toolkits.

Tip of the hat to Corante's Many2Many.

Jain, Singh, & Liu: P2P Crawling

2004-05-05T23:55:00-04:00

Link parkin: A couple of folks at Georgia Tech are working on a P2P based Web crawler.

Page, Brin, Motwani, & Winograd: PageRank

2004-05-04T23:47:00-04:00

I keep reading and hearing about Google's "secret" and "propietary" PageRank algorithm. Hey folks, the damn original PageRank paper is on the Web! So's the original Google paper, illustrating that Python is actually decent for something ;-)

Sanderson: Random Python Stuff / HTML Template

2004-05-04T23:40:00-04:00

Hamish Sanderson (interpreting from the URL) is providing a nice collection of Python utilities. I originally stumbled onto HTMLTemplate but HTMLCalendar looks mighty tempting.

Chakrabarti & UCR: iVia

2004-05-03T23:57:00-04:00

Soumen Chakrabarti chanced upon an old weblog post and shot me a quick e-mail. Focused crawlers are hitting their 3rd generation and he's participating in an effort to build an open source framework for creating intelligent crawlers, iVia, an Infomine creation. Sounds like RSS is on their radar.

IBM: Jikes RVM

2004-05-03T23:50:00-04:00

Okay PL stuff has been pretty non-existent here, but IBM's Jikes Research Virtual Machine looks cool. A language has reached the "serious" (in an academic sense) when it can self-host, which Jikes RVM does in spades. Not only is it written in Java, the RVM can run the code for RVM on itself!!

Medill: goskokie.com

2004-04-27T17:19:00-04:00

As part of the behind the scenes team supporting the project, I'll send what little PageRank this site has to goskokie.com. Put together as a project for this year's Medill New Media Capstone, the site is a living laboratory on Hyperlocal Citizen's Media. Part weblog, part forum, part photo gallery, we're still feeling our way around, but if you have any investment in Skokie, IL, take a gander, contribute, and/or spread the word.

Intel Berkeley: Jabberwock & Familiar Strangers

2004-04-27T11:05:00-04:00

The fine folks at Intel's Berkeley Research Lab are deploying a mobile phone application, Jabberwocky, to investigate "familiar strangers", as part of the Urban Atmospheres project.

I haven't quite parsed what the purpose of the project is, other than to study the relationship we have with folks we regularly encounter, but never interact with. But Eric Paulos, a former neighbor in Soda Hall, is part of the team, and that guy has some chops.

Pillai: HarvestMan

2004-04-23T23:20:00-04:00

Link parkin': Anand Pillai, howdy neighbor, is working on a new revision of HarvestMan, a modular Web crawler written in Python.

Wells: Inside Gigablast

2004-04-22T11:24:00-04:00

ACM Queue has an interview with Matt Wells, the one man propietor of the Gigablast search engine. Lots of nice morsels in here, including the observation that PageRank is a bit of a red herring when it comes to Google's success. And if carefully engineered, you can do a heck of a lot with only 8 commodity class computers.

Thanks to John Battelle (two ts, two ls, two es) for the pointer.

NMH: Blogosphere Stagnant?

2004-04-21T23:56:00-04:00

Have there been any major blogging technology related advances in the last year? Feedster is "enh" for me. Bittorrent and RSS feels like a solution in search of a problem. User interfaces and authoring tools are moribund. Atom is seeping into the ground, but there hasn't been a breakout application.

I know I've mentioned this before, but a desktop aggregator, extensible using a major scripting language, might spark things. The key leverage I'm looking for is hooking into the user's interactions with the aggregator, not synthetic feeds, or remote control. I wanna know when the user reads an item, when they add a new feed, when they delete a feed, when they mark an item, etc. And I want to be able to add new toolbars, menus, visualizations, etc. Yeah, I know Awasu and Radiou Userland can do some of that, but I found the extension mechanisms in both to be a bit clunky.

Still pining for an aggregator platform on par with Gnus/Emacs, or Mozilla.

Bray: Serious Syndication

2004-04-21T23:28:00-04:00

Tim Bray relates some insider information on serious usage of RSS within organizations that don't give a hoot about the "blogosphere". Key points: RSS saves on bandwidth, and it's useful for monitoring information flows independent of content.

Blogdex: Gamed? Suspect?

2004-04-19T23:42:00-04:00

Cameron Marlowe suspects that Blogdex is being gamed. The jury is still out but there's a bigger issue. These ad hoc ranking services, which are often touted as reliable meausrements of blogosphere popularity, have the same problems as Google, with 1/1000th the staff.

The genie's out of the bottle now. How far can Blogdex, Technorati, Daypop, et.al. be trusted?

kernel-machines.org

2004-04-17T12:20:00-04:00

Link parkin': kernel machines are the generalization of SVMs. kernel-machines.org seems to be authoratative on the subject.

SW/OfCD: txtkit

2004-04-17T12:16:00-04:00

I don't know how well txtkit works, but the screenshots are damn cool looking!
The Schoenerwissen Office for Computational Design has put together a toolbox for doing visual text mining. Not only are there pretty pictures, but a command line interface. I'd grab it in a hearbeat if it wasn't Mac OS X only.

There's probably an interesting little domain specific/scripting language hidden in there.

Hung: ecto Win32

2004-04-16T22:39:00-04:00

Alex Hung's ecto for Windows looks like a nice weblog authoring tool. Of course my copy of Frequency is rolling over even as I post this.

Freshly Squeezed SW: PulpFiction

2004-04-16T22:32:00-04:00

Link parkin': PulpFiction is the MacOS X answer to NewsGator. Looks sweet.

And the AppleScript support seems mighty juicy.

Pining for the Mac.

NMH: The Import of iRank

2004-04-16T00:18:00-04:00

Speaking of iRank, I actually read the paper closely, as opposed to most folks in the blogosphere. Many (or at least the ones I could find) drew their conclusions based upon the Wired News article. A fine piece, but it misses the true import of iRank.

A component of iRank is based upon how a weblog behaves over time. A literal reading of PageRank depends only upon what a site explicitly is, e.g. content and links. In iRank, behavior is used to generate implicit links between weblogs. Implicit links between posts, pages, and sites will be the next wave of crawling, indexing, searching. They're more adaptive and harder to spam.

Besides, it gives all of those machine learning folks something to do.

I don't know if it will lead to a more "egalitarian" blogosphere, but there can be as many implicit measures as opinions, and ergo, many more ranking systems.

Technorati: 7 Day Memory?

2004-04-15T23:54:00-04:00

Am I brain damaged or is Technorati? There doesn't seem to be any way to search for posts older than 7 days. Makes Technorati a bit less useful as a research tool. Other than pissing contests, what's the purpose of a search engine that goes only 7 days back?

For example, try digging around for information on iRank, the blog ranking algorithm devised to reflect information epidemic effects. You may have to use "infectious epidemic" to get anything useful. On Feedster.

Since I nailed the folks at Waypathbefore, I have to give them kudos for doing a pretty good job on this topic.

NMH: @AOIR 5.0

2004-04-15T23:21:00-04:00

Just when I thought "no news is bad news", word comes in that my extended abstract for AOIR 5.0 was accepted. No good deed goes unpunished and now I have to write the damn thing!!

Sussex, here I come.

Airtight Interactive: SimpleViewer

2004-04-14T23:48:00-04:00

A free, as in at least beer, Flash image viewing application.

Porchdog SW: Spike Net Shared Clipboard

2004-04-14T23:37:00-04:00

4 years ago, I had a student Dennis Killerich, work on an independent study to implement an MS Windows clipboard that could be shared across the network. We probably weren't the first and definitely not the last to pursue the notion.

However, Porchdog Software looks like they're seriously trying to perfect it with their crossplatform Spike application. Definitely worth a tire kick.

Batelle: A9 On The Loose

2004-04-14T23:33:00-04:00

John Batelle has the first and best analysis of A9, Amazon's leap into search.

Kottke: End of Syndication

2004-04-14T23:26:00-04:00

Jason Kottke opines that since the major usage of RSS and Atom is presentation and browsing in tools like FeedDemon, the term syndication is becoming less appropriate. I agree, but I'm not at a loss for what the right next term is: aggregation.

The unifying element amongst the current crop of microcontent browsers is that they collect from multiple sources. The only other unifying concept is the push, automated update, mechanisms they all have.

Tauber: Journeyman of Some

2004-04-14T23:16:00-04:00

James Tauber's weblog is recommended by Tim Bray. Anybody interested in applying machine learning to weblogs gets a gold star in my book.

Scholkopf: Statistical Learning Tutorial

2004-04-14T23:07:00-04:00

Link parkin': A tutorial from Microsoft Research on stastical learning methods including how Support Vector Machines work.

Fotsch: mfgraph

2004-04-13T11:40:00-04:00

Link parkin': mfgraph makes GraphViz mucho usable under Windows.

Hugunin: IronPython

2004-04-11T22:57:00-04:00

Link parkin': IronPython is a CLR Python implementation that allegedly runs faster than CPython.

BurningDoor: Burn This!

2004-04-10T23:01:00-04:00

Link parkin': The folks at BurningDoor have an unofficial FeedBurner dev/suport weblog going.

Brin: 2020 Vision

2004-04-10T22:56:00-04:00

I've had a few pages lying around in saved tabs for a while and finally bothered to actually give a few their just due

One was a short piece, entitled 2020 Vision, by David Brin in the Online Journalism Review, which I thought was going to be an interview of the noted science fiction author. Imagine my surprise when it turned out to be a short fiction piece, only tangentially related to the "future of news".

To my ears, it read somewhat like an overstimulated piece of mid-90's cyberpunk. Lots of neato, gee whizzy stuff jumping out of every paragraph. Toned down a bit it could be the start of a good short story or a novel.

Still it was quite entertaining.

NMH: Feed Segregation & Aggregator Extensibility

2004-04-08T23:11:00-04:00

Wouldn't it be nice if RSS aggregators had plug-in architectures that allowed you to build internal services that operated on groupings of RSS feeds? I monitor a lot of feeds, and I've noticed that I scan them in a particular order. More personal, less frequent (but still regular) feeds tend to get read early and repeatedly. Bursty, less personal streams get put off, often for days at a time.

I'd like to lump those low priority ones into a group and have my aggregator perform operations on collected items. For example, cluster and summarize them, a.k.a. Google News on the Desktop. Currently, we're in a primitive state where you have to write your own aggregator to try this out.

Dreaming of the ultimate aggregator as platform tool.

Pilgrim: Normalizing Feed Stuff

2004-04-08T22:54:00-04:00

Sigh. I guess if you want to write an RSS feed crawler, you better know about all this michegas.

Hey, isn't it about time for another RSS vs Atom flame war!

NAS: Mapping Knowledge Domains

2004-04-08T22:47:00-04:00

Link parkin': In the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) looks to be the collected results of a colloquium on wrangling unstructured information. Looks to be a goldmine of network analysis techniques.

Tip of the cap to Roland Piquepaille, via Smart Mobs.

Weiss: Gibson aleph

2004-04-06T22:53:00-04:00

Apropos of nothing, Anton Rauben Weiss has gathered a trove of William Gibson related information.

Pop quiz. Where did a quote, oft attributed to Gibson, "the street finds it own uses," actually appear? Note, it's not Neuromancer and is suprisingly hard to find (at least it was for me).

NASA: CPI Calculator

2004-04-05T23:43:00-04:00

I'm often the first to say, "Yeah, but what is that in real dollars?" Now, thanks to NASA, I've got a calculator to find out.

Of course as my friend Carl Smith is fond of pointing out, there's plenty of CPI calculators on the Web, all slightly different.

Bruner: Blogging Booming

2004-04-05T23:37:00-04:00

Not a whole lot new to me, but Rick Bruner does a nice recap of some recent empirical publications on the blogosphere.

NMH: Gmail a bad business decision?

2004-04-04T21:50:00-04:00

Just parking a quick thought, but Google's Gmail strikes me as something of a bad business decision if it gets pursued in that fasion. They're going up against two deeply entrenched, well managed concerns (MS/Hotmail & Yahoo/YahooMail) on a service that people really care about (no errors allowed), and one that doesn't invite much innovation. Seriously, how much different is e-mail now from e-mail in 1994? Not much. They're also going to have a hard time getting bleeding edge types to adopt, since they're already heavily invested in some email application.

So I have a hard time seeing this beta move to being monetized, unless there's a huge draw that I've missed. Seems like more of a honeypot to attract users for more service experiments, e.g. contextual ads in a context besides Web search

Then again, they could always pull a WebFountain, and make it a service large corporations can adopt and use to get better knowledge management.

Skrenta: Topix Weblog

2004-04-04T21:33:00-04:00

Link parkin': Topix.Net is a news feed aggregation service, built by Rich Skrenta. He also keeps a weblog regarding backend developments.

There was a bit of a dustup regarding Topix's terms of service but it appears they might wind up being a bit less draconian sounding than Google's TOS.

Smathers: libbt

2004-04-03T15:35:00-05:00

Kevin Smathers led an effort to produce a C library for interacting with BitTorrent. Expect a torrent, no pun intended, of modules in various scripting languages to take advantage of this. Yet another step on the way to making BitTorrent a standard for P2P content distribution.

Tip of the hat to Don Park, even though the dang URL is ridiculously user hostile.

PyCon: Using Pyrex

2004-04-03T15:30:00-05:00

Link parkin': Two presentations from Pycon on Pyrex, using it and optimizing code with it.

Feeney: Sportscenter Sucks

2004-04-03T15:27:00-05:00

I was never one of those Dan Patrick/Keith Olbermann sycophants, but SportsCenter has gone way downhill. Oddly enough, the Sunday morning editions featuring straightahead pros like Suzy Kolber, Bob Ley, Chris Hendry, et. al. is way more enjoyable.

Also, Matt Feeney leaves out one of the really irritating developments in SportsCenter, the incorporation of advertising directly into the program, e.g. The Budweiser Hotseat, The Gatorade Ultimate Highlight, the Coors football song every Sunday evening. Frankly, SportsCenter is no longer so much a "news" program as a comedy show focusing on sports.

EFF: Deep Links & miniLinks

2004-04-03T15:12:00-05:00

Link parkin': Like I need more weblogs to read, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has two good looking feeds: Deep Links and miniLinks.

Medill: HyperLocal CitizensMedia

2004-04-03T15:07:00-05:00

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain working with Medill students on a project prototyping hyperlocal citizen's media. No knowing where this will go, but the students are gung ho and have an extremely Web savvy core. I'm looking forward to the final results.

Powazek: Ode to MT

2004-04-03T15:04:00-05:00

I've always said that Movable Type is what FrontPage should have been. Derek Powazek just adds to that notion. Yeah there were additional pioneering systems, Blogger, Manila and Trellix come to mind, but MT seems to have hit the sweet spot of ease of use, extensibility, community support, and professional commercial development.

Waypath: Content Cosmos

2004-04-01T18:12:00-05:00

Waypath released a new service, link reference searching. I tried it with varied results. Analyzing clay shirky's situated software essay turned up nothing. Not quite sure I believe that one. http://www.scripting.com/ seemed to latch onto boilerplate. http://www.kinja.com/ seemed to do a lot better.

All in all, I'm not sure how end user useful these things are, but they make for great building blocks for other services.

Denton, Hourihan, et. al: Kinja

2004-04-01T18:00:00-05:00

Link parkin': Kinja is weblog tracking for the other 95%. (I can't say rest of us, because I fall in that other 5%). From the murmurs in the blogosphere, I can't say as how I'd be fixin to use it on a regular basis. Probably worth kicking the tires to see what some spit, polish, and focus can do for aggregation.

Finkelstein: Popularity, Not Authority

2004-04-01T17:57:00-05:00

Seth Finkelstein aptly demonstrates how "Google ranks popularity not authority". Take note all you would be weblog indexes.

Gonze: Webjay

2004-04-01T17:53:00-05:00

Link parkin': Webjay collects link lists of links to music. Wonder what that network structure looks like?

Weskamp & Albritton: Newsmap

2004-03-31T23:54:00-05:00

Nice hack of Google News, generating treemaps based upon what's being published there. The application seems to do well for drawing attention to "big" stories, large clusters of similar articles. But the smaller bits are not too comprehensible. For small slices, there's no good way to scan, you have to locate and hover over each one. Too much work.

Dumky: HTTP 101

2004-03-30T23:41:00-05:00

Link parkin': A nice, accessible tutorial on how HTTP works.

Findory: Findory News

2004-03-29T19:28:00-05:00

Ran across this in the comments of John Batelle's search blog. Findory News watches what you "read" and then customizes later material for you. The slick trick is that they cookie your browser with a random id and then, I'm guessing, watch links you follow through Findory.

As someone who's prototyped a system with roughly the same idea, there are two major problems. First, there's a UI issue in that Findory can only track clicks through Findory, if I'm right. But I read news in a lot of other places, so it can only see a small window of my interests. Or they have to be so damn good I read all of my news through them. Not likely to happen.

An even bigger problem is that following a link is only an endorsement of the attractiveness of the headline, not the final destination. I call this the tire kicking problem. You follow the link, kick the tires by reading the lead paragraph, and then hit the back button if you're not interested. Should that article be recorded as interesting? Not in my book.

Good luck to them though!

Jarvis: Center for Citizens' Media

2004-03-28T18:45:00-05:00

Jeff Jarvis, long involved in traditional publishing, is cooking up an interesting project, along with New York University, for a center to study and promote citizens' media. Not a lot of details forthcoming, but this is the type of "big idea efforts" that journalism and communications schools can and should undertake. It's pretty clear that news organizations run for a profit need to focus on projects that add to the bottom line. Academic institutions can fill an innovation gap where the limits of these self-publishing technologies can be pushed.

Jones: Roundup Hyperdb

2004-03-27T21:54:00-05:00

Link parkin': Richard Jones, a.k.a. one half (third?) of Mechanicalcat, points out the utility of hyperdb, a Python based persistent object store. Hyperdb is a core part of Roundup, an issue tracking application.

Lourier: Blogrunner, YABI

2004-03-26T23:04:00-05:00

Link parkin': Yet Another Blog Index. Philippe (one ell, two ps, no Robert) Lourier's Blogrunner. Blogrunner claims to have a PageRank equivalent inside.

Blogdex, Popdex, Technorati, Blogpulse, Blogosphere.us, Blogrunner, Waypath, Blogstreet Top 100. Yeesh, someone needs to do a bakeoff.

FeedBurner: Proxying Syndication

2004-03-25T18:59:00-05:00

FeedBurner, spotted a while ago but just now posting about, is a new service that proxies syndication feeds (RSS, Atom), and does various transformations on them. For example, if you only want to bother with an RSS 2.0 feed, they'll transform it into an Atom feed. According to John Battelle (2 ts, 2 es, 2 ells), they can also provide readership statistics.

Interesting but tricky model. FeedBurner is essentially providing canned computation, which is fraught with all sorts of DoS issues. However, since the computations are transformations, transformations created by FeedBurner no less, and not arbitrary computations, e.g. random script, I'm sure limiting resources is much easier. I'm sure there's some interesting distributed programming issues in the background there too.

I'm not quite sure about outsourcing the URL of one's feed, but apparently if you've got some server chops, you can use an HTTP temporary redirect to use the service, but keep your URL.

Sony: Librie Ebook w/ E-Ink

2004-03-25T11:14:00-05:00

According to CNet, Sony will soon be shipping the Librie, an e-book device based upon "electronic paper" technology. Initially only available in Japan, the pricepoint is looking like $400 US, for better readability and power consumption than a typical PDA. It's unclear whether the thing does more than display e-books. Also, you don't get the flexiblity that e-paper producers have been touting.

Apparently the e-book concept ain't quite dead yet.

Scopeware: NewsWatcher

2004-03-23T23:53:00-05:00

Link parkin': NewsWatcher is the new aggregator on the block. The twist is that it incorporates Gelernter's Lifestreams concept for viewing feeds.

Kalsey: Button Maker

2004-03-22T23:07:00-05:00

Link parkin': Just in case, Kalsey Consluting's Button Maker. For when I need to look like the rest of the pack.

Sifry: Technorati Beta Release

2004-03-22T22:58:00-05:00

According to David Sifry, and he should know, Technorati's beta has become the official front end. Besides UI, speed, and feature upgrades, there's a new Technorati developer's API.

Levy & Wippler: e4graph

2004-03-22T22:53:00-05:00

kjBuckets is a toothsome, and long in the tooth, Python library that has an elegant graph module I've been putting to good use lately. But I'm always on the lookout for more options. e4graph is a C++ library, written by Jacob Levy & Jean-Claude Wippler, with Python bindings. Possible big wins are persistence and the ability to deal with huge data sets. I'll have to pop this on the top of the kick the tires stack.

Pietriga: zvtm

2004-03-21T12:06:00-05:00

zvtm is a zoomable ui toolkit, implemented by Emmanuel Pietriga. Looks interesting but than gui toolkit screenshots always do. I wonder how it compares to Jazz and Jazz's follow on Piccolo?

Udell: Use Firefox

2004-03-20T17:19:00-05:00

You should use Mozilla Firefox, because I said so. And so does Jon Udell.

Gruber: Markdown

2004-03-20T16:36:00-05:00

Yet another non-HTML markup language for weblog writing, called Markdown, has been cooked up by John Gruber, The Daring Fireball. Easily plugs into Movable Type.

Just thinking out loud, but even though many of these markup languages are designed to deal with the limitations of editing in a forms area, they can make editing in a desktop app easier too.

Google: Local Search

2004-03-18T17:44:00-05:00

Google's local search provides one more reason not to visit or even know about your local newspaper's web site.

NMH: Retirement Plans

2004-03-18T17:36:00-05:00

You heard it here first. I won't be a professor by the time I'm 40.

With stuff like Final Scratch and Technics Digital Turntables I'm going to run away and become DJ CallCC.

This post also illustrates why tools like Onfolio really might be useful. I tend to pile up interesting links in Mozilla Firefox tabs. When Windows XP fall down, go boom (and yes I have seen random blue screens), there goes all of my interesting material. I had really wanted to post about Final Scratch but had lost the link in just such a disaster. Luckily I ran across the link again in my aggregator, but a frantic search initially failed.

blog-o-fobik: Python and Flash

2004-03-17T23:41:00-05:00

The mysterious klaut of blog-o-fobik has gone to the trouble to figure out how to use COM to drive Flash movies from Python. Kewl!!

This is a nice entree into using sophisticated 2D graphics and animation as interaction elements in Python applications. Win32 only though, due to the usage of the Flash ActiveX component.

Onfolio: Organizing Browsing

2004-03-16T23:49:00-05:00

Link parkin': Onfolio is new application to help you organize the stuff you find when browsing. Hard to see how this is any better than the first wave of bookmark managers.

Frasca: Video Games of the Oppressed

2004-03-16T23:46:00-05:00

Link parkin': Gonzalo Frasca's master's thesis entitled, "Video Games of the Oppressed".

Thain: Fault Tolerant Shell

2004-03-16T23:43:00-05:00

Douglas Thain has concoted the Fault Tolerant Shell, an experiment in merging scripting (high level, process oriented programming) with distributed computing. Apparently th e Fault Tolerant Shell is the residue of a new philosophy regarding grid computing, known as the Ethernet approach.

I wonder how the Fault Tolerant Shell compares with scsh as a scripting language.

PEJ: State of News Media

2004-03-15T12:51:00-05:00

Link parkin': The Project for Excellence in Journalism has released a voluminous report on "The State of the News Media". Vultures flocking even as I speak.

Gillmor: Making the News

2004-03-14T13:16:00-05:00

Link parkin': Pre-release of the first chapter of "Making the News", Dan Gillmor's upcoming book on the media in a world when everyone can be a journalist.

KSG: Trent Lott Case Study

2004-03-14T13:11:00-05:00

Link parkin': Harvard's Kennedy School of Government recently released a case study of how weblogs were influential in the Trent Lott affair.

Rhine: Frequency

2004-03-13T17:53:00-05:00

I'm kicking the tires on Brad Rhine's Frequency desktop blog posting application. Currently, I'm liking it better than w.bloggar which, as far as I can tell, is the cream of the current crop.

Minor nit, Frequency needs a refresh button on the edit posts list.

Update There's a menu selection, Posts : Refresh List, and key combo, Ctrl-R, to take care of the above nit. Thanks to Brad Rhine

Tidbits: RSS Feed

2004-03-13T15:30:00-05:00

Ask and ye shall receive. E-Media Tidbits now has an RSS feed.

Many thanks to Adrian Holovaty, ace Web hacker and all around good guy. Maybe he can help out the Online Journalism Review folks next.

Tufte: Sparklines

2004-03-12T23:27:00-05:00

Sparklines is a concept of visual display Edward Tufte is cooking up for his next book. A sparkline is an, "intense, simple, word-sized" graphic. Damn cool.

Seems like a directory, or categorization, of weblogs could stand to use a device like sparklines as a brief quantitative summary of the regularity of posting. Sort of like the calendar except denser and more informative.

Newman: Finding Community

2004-03-12T23:14:00-05:00

Mark Newman, of the University of Michigan, was in town to give a seminar. Newman is one of the new breed of physicists/applied mathematicians who are heavy into graph theory and social networking. Newman worked closely with Duncan Watts on characterizing various properties of large simulated and empirical networks.

For the most part, the talk was an overview to anyone who's been following the area. Towards the end though, he got into recent developments in finding communities within networks. Social network analysts, and clustering afficianados, have tools that work on relatively small graphs. But in offline discussion, Mark seems to think that his work and extensions by others could scale to sparse networks of millions of nodes.

That's using one desktop machine. With a lot of RAM. But still.

For perspective, Technorati is "only" watching somewhat over 1.8 million weblogs. blo.gs claims to be monitoring about 1.4 million. Throw a small server farm at the task and you could easily apply Newman's algorithms on a reasonable time scale. The algorithms aren't particularly difficult either. You can grab the papers from his site. If you do, there's a slightly tricky hidden point, I think, involving the determination of biconnected components, but it's actually a minor issue.

Instead of these uninformative power law graphs maybe we can start to get a better picture of what the blogosphere looks like.

Divmod.Org: Nevow

2004-03-11T23:25:00-05:00

A nice Python templating system like Divmod.Org Nevow would be nice, but the inhale on the package is just way to high. I've got to pull in a whole event driven Internet protocol/server/client framework just to do templates?

McPherson: Screen Tutorial

2004-03-11T23:17:00-05:00

GNU Screen is a terminal multiplexing program that I should be using on a daily basis. The neato trick is that you can detach from a screen and reattch at a later date or even from another machine. Very useful for long running processes.

NMH: This Old Blog

2004-03-11T22:59:00-05:00

So it figures that I take two months off, and somehow my Google juice goes up. I've gotten more external contact about my blog in the past month than I did in the previous year of blogging. Not that that was a particularly high bar.

Oh yeah, now I have comment spam too. The sheer stupidity of which boggles the mind. I don't even take and display comments on this site. So it's not like the comment spammers get any Google-boost out of it.

Sheesh!

PubSub: MyStack

2004-03-11T22:44:00-05:00

MyStack is a new hosted linklist service being provided by PubSub.com. Sort of like Blogrolling.com except for link lists.

A new twist though is that a stack can be a canned keyword search that generates links. This search runs against PubSub's search engine of blogs, newsgroups, and news feeds. This lightweight hosted Web service idea is catching on.

Here's a thought. When will indivdual weblogs morph into platforms for integrating services? Maybe that old "personal portal" idea wasn't so stupid after all. The key would be that if they were closer to writing and syndication tools, people would be come more attached and thereby more interested in pulling in services. The hard part is keeping the programming barrier to entry pretty low though.

Sajip: Logging 4 Python

2004-03-11T15:59:00-05:00

Vinay Sajip has put together a configurable logging module for Python. Probably something I should check out given all of the Python code I'm writing these days.

Flickr: Weblog Posting

2004-03-10T18:05:00-05:00

YOU SMELL LIKE ROBOTS

Originally uploaded by riddle.

Posted by xjam from

Flickr a chat, community, and networking tool centered around images, allows you to easily post to your own weblog regarding an image on Flickr. Great idea, making connections to tools people already have easy. Well, we'll see

One interesting thing about Flickr, is that users have a limited amount of image storage: only 50 photos total. Not horrible, but not much in an age where images are really cheap. Then again, even though storage is cheap, images can probably chew it up pretty quick.

And the actual formatting leaves something to be desired, but hey, the price is right.

Crosbie: News Survival and the Web

2004-03-04T13:10:00-05:00

Vin Crosbie finally cuts loose with his previously promised take on a succesful strategy for online news. Along the way, he takes the current news industry, online and offline, to task for poor judgement, lack of vision, and general all around myopia.

The key to his strategy? Focusing on the service that news organizations provide as the real value add and using technology to make hyper-relevant personal editions.

RSS/aggregator zealots will now get all worked up about how this specific technology is what Vin is talking about. Take a deep breath folks. RSS has a long way to go before it can meet the goals he discussed. But it's a good start.

And somebody please tell OJR to get on the bandwagon and provide an RSS feed

Chakrabarti: Web Mining Book

2004-03-03T23:50:00-05:00

Soumen Chakrabarti's book, Mining the Web: Analysis of Hypertext and Semi Structured Data should be required reading for anyone who claims to be doing any sort of large scale Web page/site analysis. Especially all those folks trying to do bad PageRank knockoffs.

WWW 2004: Weblog Ecosystem Workshop

2004-03-02T00:25:00-05:00

Mainly for my future reference, I need to stash a link to the Weblog Ecosystem Workshop at the WWW 2004 conference. It'll be interesting to see how rigorous this first edition is. Besides the folks at IBM Almaden and the search engine companies, who's taking weblogs seriously as an academic pursuit from the technical side?

Must ... make ... submission ... deadline

Flickr: Photo Sharing

2004-03-02T00:21:00-05:00

Flickr came to life during my hiatus. It's a social environment for sharing photos. I think it would be cool if you could easily embed links in images and create photo meshes. Think of the network analysis possiblities in that!

NMH: I'm Back

2004-03-02T00:18:00-05:00

One two, one two!

Is this thing on!

Makofsky: TreeMapping RSS Feeds

2004-01-03T21:55:00-05:00

Steve Makofsky, aka The Furrygoat, generated an interesting visualization of RSS feed content. I think he undersells the potential of this technique a bit. A bit stale, but mainly interesting for the link to a .Net TreeMap control.

For those scoring at home, yes I'm alive, but recurring bouts with flu/cold are severely slowing me down.

AOL: Involvement Journalism

2003-12-29T21:32:00-05:00

Slightly stale, but an America Online press release indicates the media giant is pushing forward in integrating the activities of its membership with its news creation and distribution mechanisms. Of particular interest is connecting social activity with news search and interactive features.

Lee: python-spidermonkey

2003-12-29T19:14:00-05:00

John J. Lee has put together python-spidermonkey, a way to bridge the Mozilla SpiderMonkey JavaScript (written in C) into a Python interpreter.

I actually saw this a few days ago in the Daily Python URL, but didn't really grasp the significance. Simon Willison pointed out how this might be useful as an embedded interpreter within Python, without having to write a complete language implementation. This could be useful for Python apps that want to expose a scripting mechanism, but can't quite sandbox Python to satisfaction. Sounds wacky, embedding a scripting engine in a scripting engine, but SpiderMonkey is a bit better behaved for restricted execution. Heck, it's burned in through thousands (millions?) of hours of use in Mozilla.

Cozens: Blogging w/ Bryar

2003-12-26T15:25:00-05:00

Bryar is a Perl based blogging tool cooked up by Simon Cozens. It seems to occupy an intermediate position between Blosxom on the one hand and Movable Type on the other, in the simplicity/flexibility/completeness spectrum. Probably worth kicking the tires on.

Andyed: Faceted Image Browsing

2003-12-24T00:03:00-05:00

Mostly link parkin: Surf*Mind*Musings on some Php image galleries.

Pilgrim: Ultra-liberal RSS Locator

2003-12-23T23:57:00-05:00

Need to find RSS feeds from a Python script? Put Mark Pilgrim's RSS locating module in your crawler and smoke 'em.

Chung et. al.: Internet Mathematics

2003-12-23T23:44:00-05:00

Digging around for some papers on network growth models, I ran across a preprint of a paper by Michael Mitzenmacher scheduled for the new journal Internet Mathematics. Fan Chung (Graham?) is the managing editor of a seriously kick ass editorial board.

By the way, if you really want to understand the literature (across a number of fields) regarding growth models that generate power law distributions, you'll want to read Mitzenmacher's brief history of the area. It's not too hard to find using Google.

And of course it figures that the essence of the model was presented in 1955 by (Herb?) Simon. There really isn't much new in computer science.

Correction: I know think it's just Fan Chung and the journal web page has a typo.

Mystery solved. Chauvinist that I am, I didn't think that it might have been a woman with a professional and a married name. Mae culpa. I'll just leave it at Chung though.

NMH: Making Peace with XP

2003-12-22T16:28:00-05:00

Okay, I think I've just about crafted a halfway decent environment under Windows XP. As opposed to MacOS X, I had to pull a lot of stuff from the 'Net. Basically I've papered over XP to make it feel more UNIXy. Here's what I'm currently using to replace a combo of NetNewsWire, Omni Outliner, and Safari, plus a baked in *BSD substrate:

Cygwin (UNIX replacement) Back to the Future
XEmacs (Text editor) Baked into my genes
FeedDemon (RSS aggregator) Enough keyboard customization to make it livable
Mozilla Firebird (Web browser) Must have tabbed browsing!!
Mozilla Thunderbird (e-mail) Need a change from Outlook/Entourage
ActionOutliner (outliner) Nice, simple keyboard controls, and lets you put URLs in the outline

Of course it's a heck of a lot more work downloading and installing all of this stuff, then buying Jaguar and installing 2 more apps.

FeedDemon: Tolerable

2003-12-18T23:11:00-05:00

So FeedDemon isn't quite the savior of RSS aggregation for me under Windows XP, but I've configured it well enough that the actual task of reading doesn't drive me up a wall. Now if I can get some semblance of the hierarchical outline that NetNewsWire has I'll be happy.

The key thing about NetNewsWire's outline and how it presents folders is that it provides so much context on progress made. I can quickly see how many unviewed items in aggregate are left, as well as in particular groupings.

You really don't appreciate some things until they're gone.

Bernstein: Simulating the Blogosphere

2003-12-18T01:33:00-05:00

Link parkin': Mark Bernstein simulates the effects of advertising in the blogosphere. Massive clustering of readership occurs. Sez any decent programmer should be able to recreate and validate the experiment.

Hmmmm.....

Grosso: On RSS Aggregators

2003-12-18T01:07:00-05:00

With a spate of Web based, RSS aggregation services coming online, it's most appropriate that William Grosso deliver an analysis of the pros and cons of desktop versus server aggregators.

Synopsis? The desktop will be the home of high cost per user services, e.g. tight UI interaction. Server side will rule where aggregating users is important, e.g. metasyndication services.

I'll be interested to see which side wins the bleeding edge extension race. With a decent plug-in architecture, a popular desktop platform would have many more developers. Then again, a server side implementation that presented a really good Web services API (ala Amazon and Google) could be a killer.

Thinking outloud? What if there was a standardized way to represent the reading state of a blogroll? Then you could sync a desktop and a server side aggregator to get the best of both worlds.

NMH: Ode to NetNewsWire

2003-12-17T22:23:00-05:00

Work and a flakey TiBook have slowed down posting here. The laptop inconsistency has also forced me to work on a Windows Tablet PC for a bit. In trying to recreate my MacOS X environment I've been kicking the tires on Win32 RSS aggregators.

Jeez, they suck.

Alright, maybe I'm being a little harsh, but relative to NetNewsWire, they drive me up a wall.

It's actually a couple of minor details that kill. First, many, not all but many, Win32 RSS aggregators don't do folders, or do them nearly as elegantly as NetNewsWire. Second, spacebar reading, if it even exists often doesn't work right. For example, in Outlook based aggregators such as NewsGator or IntraVnews, if you read all of the posts for a given feed, the spacebar doesn't advance you to the next unread post. You have to navigate out to the group level, pick a group, and then start reading again. Usually without the support of any keyboard shortcuts.

And lastly, the arrow navigation in NetNewsWire is to die for. With one hand I can maneuver through feeds, groups of feeds, posts, and then to where posts link to.

The beauty is that NetNewsWire's structuring gives me better perspective on the reading process, especially for 100 or so busy feeds. I can't imagine dealing with a 300 or so post pile of mush when I actually get a chance to visit my aggregator.

Previously, I really didn't see what all the fuss Dave Winer and Scott Rosenberg were making about all-in-one aggregation views. After having suffered through a host of bad navigation options, I can see their point.

FeedDemon may be my only hope.

But NetNewsWire is still cuter than a bunny's bottom.

Pitts: Blogs in Newsroom

2003-12-14T20:33:00-05:00

From the Dead Parrot Society, Ryan Pitts writes of how one newsroom plans to incorporate weblogs into its coverage of the Saddam Hussein capture. To summarize, excerpts from foreign blogs will be used as react material.

Random thought. Weblogs, to the extent that they submit to standards of verification, are an open source of reporting. There's no reason that every other paper in the country couldn't be mining local, national, and international weblogs to get personal stories for their own stories.

Don't quite know where I'm going with that, but something to think about.

Unsworth: Digital by Default

2003-12-13T00:28:00-05:00

John Unsworth penned a Not-so-Modest Proposal, discussing the future of scholarly communication. The major theme is that humanities organizations should start thinking of collecting digital articles as a default (Caveat from a colleague Michell Citron, digital doesn't preserve as well as analog).

Unsworth was the founder of UVA's Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, so he's got a few chops. He's also a very nice guy, as I met him at a luncheon when he came to NU to consult with the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences about technology in our humanities programs.

Just for the record, Chicagoland has a great opportunity for a moon shot in this direction with Northwestern, University of Chicago, The Field Museum, The Chicago Historical Society, The Newberry Library and The Art Institute of Chicago within a tiny geographic area.

Oh, did I mention that they're all within easy reach of a new Chicago area optical network? What's a few gigabytes between friends?

ATAC: Security Smarties

2003-12-13T00:09:00-05:00

The guys at the Abusable Technologies Awareness Center might be one of the best collections of security experts ever.

McNab: LUFS-Python

2003-12-13T00:06:00-05:00

Everybody going's gaga over David McNab's Linux user level file system implemented in Python, but fuse looks just as good.

And besides, it's not quite as sweet a hack as writing Linux kernel modules in Scheme.

Turnbull: OmniOutliner Tricks

2003-12-12T23:49:00-05:00

Giles Turnbull tells you how to make my favorite outliner (OmniOutliner) stand on its head and do all sorts of fun export tricks.

NMH: Coining Metasyndication Services

2003-12-09T23:37:00-05:00

I'm sure someone else has thought of the term already, but in the spirit of Waypath's meta-weblog services, I thought of a generalization: metasyndication services. Eventually there'll be quite a lot more information flowing through RSS, the majority of which might not come from weblogs. But there will be meta services that aggregate, analyze, and distribute that content and even operate on larger scale, complex dynamics of those feeds.

Heck there's only a few references on Google to the term "metasyndication" and nothing for "metasyndication services".

NMH: 500+ posts and counting

2003-12-09T22:25:00-05:00

I just zipped past post 500 and didn't even notice it.

Must be getting the hang of this thing.

Wright: Parking Lott

2003-12-09T22:22:00-05:00

Chris Wright, publishing in gnovis, documents how blogs gave the Trent Lott story enough initial legs for traditional media to finally latch on.

Somehow I bet this'll be cited in quite a few grant proposals. And is it just me, or are there a bazillion peer reviewed online journals dealing with communication, society, and technology? I didn't know there were enough academics in the states to do all that reviewing.

Intel: Probabilistic Networks Library

2003-12-09T22:16:00-05:00

Actually, it's not that type of networks.

Intel is BSD licensing a library for doing machine learning based on graph models, e.g. Bayesian networks.

Thanks to Ted Leung

Neuberg: AppleScript Definitive Guide

2003-12-09T22:11:00-05:00

Since I've been interested in AppleScript for a long while, maybe I'll treat myself to Matt Neuberg's new book on the topic.

After XMas.

Media Awareness Project: Drug RSS

2003-12-05T18:38:00-05:00

Whatever side of the drug policy debate you fall in with, you have to admit that the Media Awareness Project has a lot of RSS feeds on the topic.

DeVigal: InteractiveNarratives.org

2003-12-03T23:46:00-05:00

I met Andrew DeVigal at the ONA conference in mid November. He's an Assistant Prof at San Francisco State University, who helps out on the student online magazine version of [X]press. He also maintains a nice trove of links and summaries about online interactive narratives entitled obviously enough, InteractiveNarratives.org.

Esleben: JunkBroom

2003-12-03T23:38:00-05:00

Link parkin': Jan-Ole Esleben's JunkBroom is a Bayesian spam filter plug-in for Microsoft Entourage.

Did I mention I've seen an order of magnitude more spam in my inbox over the last week or so?

Foetsch: Python & mfGraph

2003-12-03T23:35:00-05:00

Michael Foetsch (I've got learn how to put umlauts in HTML), has released Python bindings for mfGraph, a toolkit for working with GraphViz graphs.

Wired News: Repurposing AP Copy

2003-12-03T23:22:00-05:00

Maybe this has been happening for a while, but I was mildly distrubed to see Wired News running straight AP copy. This is a far cry from the folks who wanted to be at the head of the typhoon of change sweeping our times.

How the mighty have fallen...

Kaufman: TMQ Interview

2003-12-03T23:19:00-05:00

Just because I'm a sports junkie:

Salon's King Kaufman interviews Gregg Easterbrook, author of Tuesday Morning Quarterback, a rather entertaining weekly column on happenings in the NFL. The interview is wide ranging, mainly focusing on how and why Easterbrook got fired from ESPN.com for weblogging somewhere else, and his reactions to the situation.

Mainly I'm in agreement that Americans need to take sports a little less seriously. Sell out for your team when it's in the moment, but leave the overheated passion at the stadium.

And don't be a meanie about it!

Philips: Python Dictionary Recipe

2003-12-02T23:43:00-05:00

In a recent addition to the Python cookbook, Richard Philips presents an elegant way to create dictionaries from lists (plists for you Lisp old timers), using Python's built-in dict, zip, and list slices.

Ford: Harpers.org Remixed

2003-12-01T22:41:00-05:00

Harpers.org was recently redesigned by Paul Ford of Ftrain.com. From Ford's peek inside the process, Semantic Web technology was used to allow the massive amount of content Harper's has to be utilized in many different ways.

I have my doubts about Semantic Web technology, but this is a great example of how one designer, who has control over the ontology, can make it work.

And oh yeah, Harpers' still has some of the best written words in the world.

Pew: Technoelites Driving Media

2003-11-30T13:40:00-05:00

According to a relatively recent report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project: " There is a trendsetting technology elite in the U.S. who chart the course for the use of information goods and services."

Stashing for later reading. Thanks to the NITLE weblog.

Gregorio: pyTidy

2003-11-30T13:21:00-05:00

Joe Gregorio put together a Python module to wrap TidyLib and make it easy to clean up non-conforming HTML-like text.

Levien: Why BitTorrent Matters

2003-11-28T21:40:00-05:00

New to me, but slightly stale, Raph Levien countered some Tim Bray skepticism regarding whether BitTorrent is a radical technology or not. Granted I don't really use BitTorrent, but I sympathize with Raph's point of view. I'm waiting for some enterprising PR firm to use it to build buzz on an indie or underground film.

Think Blair Witch ratcheted up a notch. Or Gibson's Pattern Recognition.

Probably happened already.

Reis & Moreira: Apoo, Assembly in Python

2003-11-28T21:27:00-05:00

Apoo is "An environment for a first course in assembly programming." Implemented in Python, it looks like a cool environment for working with assembly, and also a a potential embedded VM for programming language hacking.

JCraft: JSch

2003-11-28T21:20:00-05:00

Link parkin': JCraft recently released JSch yet another SSH2 implementation in Java. I'm not absolutely sure, but it looks like JSch can be combined with JTA to get an SSH shell in an applet, leading to secure remote login from anywhere you can get a Web browser.

NOSSDAV: 2004 CFP

2003-11-28T21:04:00-05:00

Got 3000 good words to say about digital media, networks, and/or operating systems? Then the International Workshop on Network and Operating Systems Support for Digital Audio and Video (14th year ) is for you. Paper submissions need to be pre-registered by Feb 23, final deadline Mar. 1

Bartunov & Sigaev: PostgreSQL/tsearch2

2003-11-27T22:16:00-05:00

Link parkin': tsearch2 is a PostgreSQL extension for doing text indexing on table columns. Neat feature, tsearch2 extends the open source RDBMS with a term vector datatype. Seems like a good basis for doing some IR type stuff on top of an RDBMS.

NCES: Vast Majority of Kids Compute

2003-11-26T23:47:00-05:00

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 90% of kids use computers, and 59% reach the Internet.

Jeez, observing 90% of any large human population doing the same thing, other than survival functions, is amazing. Kids? Add another degree of difficulty.

Usborne: Fairies, Bagels, Hammers

2003-11-26T23:42:00-05:00

Nick Usborne relays a parable about what the Web is all about.

Normally I don't indulge in these things, but this one struck an inspirational chord.

NMH: 100 Subscription Mark

2003-11-26T23:30:00-05:00

I don't know what this means, but I've been over the 100 subscription mark for about a week now. That includes trimming some deadwood from the subs list.

Yup, starting to feel like I did in my USENET prime, he says, pulling on his suspenders.

Jarvis: Africa Oriented Blogs

2003-11-25T23:12:00-05:00

Link parkin': Jeff Jarvis has a nice collection of Africa related blogs. Might be nice to build an aggregation of these somewhere, if they have RSS feeds.

Lloyd: PythonNet

2003-11-25T23:06:00-05:00

Brian Lloyd's PythonNet integrates the Python runtime into the .Net framework, allowing Python programs to access all of the .Net toolkits (but not vice versa).

Maybe I'll actually take the time to really get into .Net programming now that I don't have to learn C# or reignite my latent C++ skills.

Obinary: Magnolia CMS

2003-11-25T22:57:00-05:00

Link parkin': Magnolia is a standards based, buzzword compliant, open source content management system, produced and maintained by Obinary.

Morris: What is Comp. Sci?

2003-11-25T22:55:00-05:00

Just because I'm teaching CS 211 next quarter.

James H. Morris tangentially points out something I've tried to drill into early CS types here at NU. Studying Computer Science is more than just learning about programming.

Morris' has two specific instances of things you wind up learning as cs major (in a good program). "How to make something work in the mud" and "How to tell what's really going on". Lord knows we struggle daily with incomplete information in bad environments, whether it be with physical robots in the real world, or software robots working on the Web.

Interesting side note, CMU seems to be seeing an uptick in female matriculation. Meanwhile, the tap is drying up here in Evanston. In the last two CS 200 level courses I've taught, there's been two women and one woman. Not a good sign.

Extor International: eSVG

2003-11-24T22:14:00-05:00

Okay, now that someone has released an SVG engine that supports embedded scripting, you can call SVG a Flash competitor.

Mostly targeted at PocketPC, I wouldn't be quaking in my boots if I was Macromedia though.

SIGCHI: ACE 2004

2003-11-24T22:03:00-05:00

Got 5000 interesting words on computers and entertainment? Submit a paper to ACM SIGCHI's Conference on Advancements in Computer Entertainment Technology.

I recognize there are plenty of other game and entertainment conferences, but as far as I know (and that ain't saying much), this is the first time ACM has gotten serious about the topic. Plus SIGCHI is arguably the most successful SIG in ACM, so this could be the start of something big. Think Supercomputing except for games, and without the bimbos of E3.

Schachter: del.icio.us

2003-11-24T21:52:00-05:00

Delicious (del.icio.us) is a social bookmarks manager.

Okay, big deal. Bookmark management isn't exactly rocket science. Anyone who's been on the web for any length of time remembers all sorts of desktop and web based tools to manage your bookmarks when the Web first arose.

Simple. The context has significantly changed since let's say, 2000 even. First, the concept of Web services, especially REST style services, now has traction. So del.icio.us has a Web native programming ecology to embed itself. Second, experimentation with large scale social Web based tools (acknowledging all the research on Usenet) is still in its infancy. Meta Weblog Services is not quite applicable here, but something meta on top of this infrastructure could easily be built.

Project5: Pears

2003-11-23T11:30:00-05:00

Link Parkin: Pears is an open source, lightweight, 3 paned, RSS aggregator written in Python.

NMH: Storytelling Symposium Followup

2003-11-22T17:50:00-05:00

Okay, last time I talk about the Medill Storytelling Symposium here.

Rich Gordon, my partner in crime in organizing the event, has two posts over at E-Media Tidbits regarding the symposium. The first encapsulates the panel on interesting ways consumers can interact with information. The second was regarding our discussion of how new media education in journalism departments has worked out. I'm sure Rich would have posted something about our third panel on digital images, but he was simultaneously busy working on the student newsroom for the ONA conference.

If you didn't make it, Rich's posts give you a good taste of what happened. Being a bit of a perfectionist, there's a lot I would have changed to make it a better event. But for a low budget, 1.5 man effort, it turned out pretty well I think.

Rosen: Spin Alley

2003-11-22T17:42:00-05:00

Jay Rosen is doing great thinking on his PressThink weblog. I wonder how much reach it's getting off of the Internet?

In any event, his latest essay, "Spin Alley" digs into the sordid state of reporting after major political events such as debates. In short, reporters rush to a blessed area where campaign flacks all deliver prepared responses, regardless of what happened at the event! Invoking Shannon and Wiener, Rosen illustrates how Spin Alley actually reduces information rather than creating it, which is what journalists are supposed to be doing.

Even worse is the proprietary nature of Spin Alley. It's an area constructed by insiders on both sides. No outsiders, such as Ralph Nader, allowed. There are nominally good reasons for doing so, but this strikes Rosen, and me, as not particularly being in the public interest.

When I read Rosen's plea to blow up Spin Alley, I new immediately plenty of others would jump on weblogs as an alternative. Jeff Jarvis is the first one out of the box that I saw.

I'll add two tweaks though. There seems to be a concept of Grid Blogging kicking around, flash mobs of bloggers writing about a particular topic. Why not grid blog about a televised debate?

The second tweak is that those grid blogging have to aggregate into a well publicized feed. Part of the reason there's a Spin Alley is that it reduces the cost of getting quotes for good copy. An RSS feed could level the playing field a bit.

And just to make it even easier, all grid bloggers would have to do is use specific keywords in their title. Then, assuming they all have an RSS feed, a standing query feed could be setup at Feedster. Complete opt-in and openness at both ends.

Burg: BlogTalk 2.0 CFP

2003-11-21T21:35:00-05:00

If you've got 500 good words on blogging, you might be able to get published at the BlogTalk 2.0 conference. It'll be held in Austria around July 2004.

The program from BlogTalk 1.0 doesn't look particularly academic but still provocative. This may be a good thing depending on your opinion.

cheesebikini: Why Phonecams?

2003-11-21T21:28:00-05:00

Sean over at cheesebikini comes perilously close to echoing my July thoughts on cameras and communication integration. In short, a camera on the network is not a camera any more. It's a communication device where image capture and transmission is natural. This means that thinking about the photographic quality is somewhat besides the point. "Photos" become much more ephemeral.

I must have been on to something, even Alan Reiter agrees.

de Hoon, et. al: Pycluster

2003-11-21T21:16:00-05:00

So I'm all jazzed wrapping CLUTO's static library in a Python module using SWIG.Things are going smoothly when on a lark I decide to hit Google with "python clustering".

Lo and behold, it gives me Pycluster, a module that wraps a C level clustering library from UC Berkeley. There's also a bunch of other toys based on the same library, all cooked up by Michiel de Hoon and friends.

It looks like there's significant overlap in the clustering algorithms provided by CLUTO vs Pycluster, but they're different enough to both be useful. One nice thing is that Pycluster actually does self-organizing maps (SOM).

Might be time for a bake-off.

SonyEricsson: GPRS & Wi-Fi Card

2003-11-21T20:59:00-05:00

SonyEricsson is now offering a PCMCIA card that provides both GPRS and Wi-Fi connectivity. I'm guessing that software to deal with handoffs between cellular and Wi-Fi services isn't there yet, but we're getting closer to seamless wireless networking. At decent data rates no less.

Looks like no MacOS X support though. Boooo!

Thanks to Gizmodo.

MIT: LL3 Conference

2003-11-20T23:15:00-05:00

Ex post facto, but the Little Languages Conference had it's third edition about two weeks ago. The program looked pretty cool, and the presentations have been recorded.

Evil RealAudio though. Yick!

MS: NT Virtual Memory

2003-11-20T23:07:00-05:00

Just because I'm teaching CS 213.

Virtual Memory in Windows NT.

Reiter: Cameraphonereport

2003-11-20T22:52:00-05:00

I finally found the feed for Alan Reiter's Cameraphonereport. Definitely thumbs up. Each post is more in depth than in any other weblog I'm subscribed to. E.g. this discussion of photo albums and cameraphones.

Jump on it if you have the spare cycles.

Personally, I think photo album types should add whiizzy non-photorealistic rendering tools for photo manipulation. The hard nut? Making the tools workable from handheld devices or non-desktop interaction in general.

Huang: Peppercoin & Micropayments

2003-11-19T23:28:00-05:00

Probably destined for linkrot, but Gregory Huang has penned a nice in depth article detailing startup Peppercoin's drive to make micropayments work. Boiling it down to the essentials, Peppercoin basically bills the buyers accurately, but randomly pays the sellers big. Conceivably, sellers could get screwed, but the stochastic properties of the system smooth out the payments. Meanwhile, paying big aggregates many small purchases and makes the micropayments cost effective.

Between Peppercoin's genius tech wizards (Ron Rivest & Silvio Micali) and smart management, it would appear to be a no-brainer.

Here's my question though. How do you get enough buyers to sign up? PayPal worked as an adjunct to eBay, but now that PayPal is part of eBay, Peppercoin can't hitch a ride on that wagon.

FutureGlue: intraVnews

2003-11-19T23:07:00-05:00

Aggregator++. intraVnews is from FutureGlue. One benefit over NewsGator is that intraVnews is free for individuals.

Kettmann: End of Edgy Sports

2003-11-19T23:02:00-05:00

Zero tech content, just sports geekery below.

Steve Kettmann, for Wired News, writes of the demise of edgy sports as The Village Voice shuts down its sport page. The only 'net angle is the discussion of how ESPN.com is slurping all of the edgy writers and putting them on Page Two.

Hey there's always RedEye.

Maybe not.

Fleishman: EDGE Everywheere

2003-11-19T22:50:00-05:00

EDGE is AT&T Wireless's 2.5G service. Over at Wi-Fi Network News, Glen Fleishman reports that AT&TW is claiming that 6,500 cities are EDGE enabled.

Uh, hunh.

Not cheap at $80/month, plus $150 for the network card to start, but at least it's in range of early adopters.

Maybe the US will get to decent cellular data in my lifetime.

Zuckerman: Global Attention Profile

2003-11-19T22:44:00-05:00

Not quite a Meta Weblog Service, but Ethan Zuckerman's Global Attention Profile charts news references on the web to countries.

Even better is Zuckerman providing source data someone can actually verify the results, and what looks to be a detailed paper on the work.

If more news moves to open RSS, it'll be easier to do these types of analyses.

Petersen: MSN Newsbot Insider

2003-11-18T23:22:00-05:00

Josh Petersen works for MSN, seems to be on Newsbot, and keeps a weblog.

Kottke: Evolving Weblogs

2003-11-18T23:17:00-05:00

Jason Kottke is reworking the presentation of his weblog, and in the process thinking about new frontends for micro-content, as Anil Dash calls it.

Proboscis: Urban Tapestries

2003-11-18T23:15:00-05:00

A loosely knit organization in the UK called Proboscis is developing an interesting experiment, entitled Urban Tapestries, in decentralized location based services and content.

Objectis: Free Plone Hosting

2003-11-18T23:02:00-05:00

Link parkin': Objectis is providing free Zope and Plone hosting. I'm something of a CMS wonk, so I'll probably take a look at some point.

Thanks to Steve Ivy.

Murphy, et. al.: Lime

2003-11-18T22:54:00-05:00

Some of us here at NU CS are kicking around the idea of using the concept of Linda Tuple Spaces for ubiquitous computing infrastructure.

If I've learned one thing though, if you think you've got a good idea in computing, odds on someone else has done something like it already.

Enter Lime, Linda in a Mobile Environment, by Amy L. Murphy, Gian Pietro Picco, and Gruia-Catalin Roman.

Luckily, Lime doesn't really attempt to address some of the issues we're interested in, so it's not a direct competitor. Heck, it's probably worth investigating as an initial codebase to modify for our own ends.

Microsoft: Newsbot

2003-11-17T21:54:00-05:00

Looks like the fine folks in Redmond are going after Google News with a beta version of MSN Newsbot. CNET has more details, but the major twist is that for Passport accepting folks, the service will customize the news presented based upon user behavior.

I was being mildly facetious when I wrote about "The Daily Me" sneaking up on us for our symposium this weekend, but this is getting pretty doggone close.

Coenraets: Flex Weblog

2003-11-17T21:44:00-05:00

No not the Flex from your compiler class. Apparently, Macromedia's Flex is a markup + oop servlet based way to generate applications on top of the Flash VM. Sounds intriguing, but you have to inhale J2EE to use it. Granted there's a lot of Tomcat knowledge out there, but this ain't a low barrier to entry.

In any event, Macromedia has appointed Christophe Coenraets as their evangelist for this technology, and he has a weblog. There's also more information over at Artima, from Sean Neville.

Medill: Storytelling Symposium

2003-11-14T22:10:00-05:00

The Medill School of Journalism is hosting a free symposium on technology and storytelling this weekend. The panels should be eclectic and entertaining. The topics are a little broader than just journalism, and the discussion should be quite accessible.

Just using the old soapbox for a little self-promotion.

ECSCW '03: Social Network Analysis Workshop

2003-11-11T08:39:00-05:00

Link parkin: Following up on an old post, the papers for the Workshop on Social Network Analysis at the European CSCW 2003 conference are up.

Goranson: Mac Outliner Survey

2003-11-11T00:30:00-05:00

Ted Goranson, in his webzine About This Particular Macintosh has been writing a monthly column on outliners. The first part presented an outliner history, while the subsequent two parts surveyed outliner details.

Personally, I'm still finding all sorts of interesting stuff in OmniOutliner, but Goranson's survey makes TinderBox sound really interesting.

Crumlish, et.al.: Radio Free Blogistan

2003-11-10T23:19:00-05:00

How in the world could I have missed Radio Free Blogistan, a weblog about weblogging and nano-publishing?

Must be gettin' old.

Waypath: BuzzMeter's Back

2003-11-10T23:16:00-05:00

The Waypath guys have reinstituted the BuzzMeter. With it you can track word and phrase occurrences across a large number of weblog postings.

Mildly useful, but has the problem that you actually need to know what the pertinent words are before you can watch them. Good for retrospective's but bad for forecasting.

NewsKnife: Google News Watch

2003-11-10T23:09:00-05:00

Well at least somebody's watching Google News! NewsKnife tracks Google News and compares their top stories with the leading stories from some major news sites such as CNN and Yahoo! News. The goal seems to be to determine how close Google News can come to these established sources.

I'm glad someone's doing such tracking, but I'm not particularly down with the interpretation. Roughly speaking, Google News seems to be getting about 2/3 of the same stories. Great if you want the same-old, same-old, but Google News' real utility is bringing to light more of the news mix out there. Expanding the horizon if you will. The Google News guys say that the service is "not edited by a human", but they've never claimed that it will "edit as well as a human."

Heaton: Pomo TV News

2003-11-08T22:57:00-05:00

Terry L. Heaton muses on the potential for wireless video, 3G & Wi-Fi, to enable new forms of broadcast news. Quote:

Meanwhile, another technology that is showing dramatic results in the U.S. is Wi-Fi, and I think this may become the most dramatic breakthrough in the video news business since the invention of video tape.

Pretty strong stuff. Heaton opines that this could eventually lead to a new, postmodern form of TV news that is rawer, more immediate, and less filtered. He (she?) goes off the deep end a little though, like some of the weblogs versus journalism types, predicting the fall of the current media structure. Then again, this is written from a European perspective.

Prediction: MTV, Entertainment Tonight, and ESPN will take advantage of this stuff long before ABC, NBC, CBS and the rest of the current news cabal.

ArsTechnica: Fixed RSS Feed

2003-11-08T22:41:00-05:00

ArsTechnica is a nice tech oriented site. The RSS feed that they have used to not have descriptions, only headlines. Recently, I've been pruning such feeds from my blogroll, and ArsTechnica was next on the chopping block.

They must have had ESP, because just today, all of the ArsTechnica feed items have descriptions. Hopefully it'll stick.

Crosbie: Free v Paid Content, Hard #'s

2003-11-07T11:32:00-05:00

Vin Crosbie of Digital Deliverance, gives a brilliant example of how to systematically dismantle a poor argument. Responding to Donn Friedman's Online Journalism Review article arguing that news sites should start charging fees for access to content, Crosbie addresses Friedman's claims point by point and leaves a pile of smoking rubble. Through hard won experience, Crosbie has solid numbers and real cases to back up his argument.

Best of all, he brings in the totality of Brand's dictum. Way too many people stop at, "information wants to be free". If they knew the balance that the remainder provides, then maybe they would balance their thinking regarding these issues.

Pollard: Salon Blogs Survey

2003-11-07T00:29:00-05:00

Dave Pollard analyzed a random sampling of Salon blogs. The news strikes me as pretty dim, especially when active means "posted once within the last month". That's a pretty low activity threshold.

Barely sustainable growth based on software from a company struggling to stay afloat is not a recipe for success.

A while I go, I thought it odd that UserLand didn't pop up in more rumors when Blogger got bought. Now UserLand seems to be falling off the radar. Then again, maybe they're pumping the product in markets I'm unaware of. But other than Salon, what other media company is using Radio UserLand for publishing?

NMH: Intermittent Posting

2003-11-06T23:34:00-05:00

Between giving a midterm, hacking, and a little symposium I'm helping to put together, updates have been a bit sketchy the past week or two.

For the 3.5 regular readers of this blog, sorry to inform you it's going to be like this for about another week and a half.

Karypis: Cluto

2003-11-06T23:29:00-05:00

Need to do some clustering on high-dimensional datasets? If you're on Linux (or FreeBSD with Linux binary support) you could do a heck of a lot worse than George Karypis' Cluto package.

Clusters feature vectors, clusters similarity graphs, has 7 different clustering methods, 4 different similarity criterion, 12 different clustering criterion, and all of the standard scaling methods on the features/similarity.

And it generates pretty pictures too.

What more could you want?!

Okay, yes it comes with a static library so you can wrap your favorite scripting language around it. Short of being open source, it's quite the bee's knees.

Halepovic & Deters: JXTA Performance

2003-11-04T23:05:00-05:00

Emir Halepovic and Ralph Deters examined "The Costs of Using JXTA" in a P2P03 conference paper.

Just keeping an eye on JXTA as a P2P infrastructure for the day I and the AquaLab get our act together.

Wired: Now Has Blogs

2003-11-04T22:55:00-05:00

Wired News online now has blogs.

Well blog (singular) since Bruce Sterling is the only blogger, currently.

No RSS! Bad, blog!! no Flow!!

InkNoise: Layoutomatic

2003-11-04T22:47:00-05:00

It doesn't have a huge amount of flexibility, but InkNoise's Layoutomatic is really handy for generating CSS based columnar layouts.

Blum: Pashua

2003-11-04T22:45:00-05:00

Link parkin: Pashua is a toolkit for grafting Mac OS X user interfaces onto UNIX scripts.

Schubert: MacOS X PDF Plug-in

2003-11-03T23:50:00-05:00

Just downloaded and installed Schuber it's MacOS X PDF Browser Plugin. First impressions are very positive. First, I'd just come to accept the horrible lag and cognitive dissonance from firing up Acrobat. This plugin nukes that issue. Second, it looks really smooth with a nice clean and quiet interface.

FTG: DIET Agents

2003-11-03T23:32:00-05:00

Link Parkin: DIET Agents is a lightweight multi-agent system developed by the Future Technologies Group within BT Exact.

Thanks to Josh Lucas' Hacking Log

Bumgarner: PyObjC

2003-10-31T06:18:00-05:00

PyObjC, an integration of Python and the Objective C API's on MacOS, is becoming very tantalizing, thanks to Bill Bumgarner's update on the project. I don't do any actual MacOS development, but PyObjC is starting to whet my appetite, given how much Python I write on a daily basis.

Memo to self: get Gigahertz AlBook, start hacking

Burkett: "Laws of the Web" Review

2003-10-31T05:38:00-05:00

In my exploration of Internet growth models, I never ran across Huberman's book "The Laws of the Web: Patterns in the Ecology of Information". Due to Jeanette Burkett's review of "The Laws of the Web..." I'll probably be checking the stacks to see if Northwestern has a copy. From her commentary though, the book seems a bit lightweight and breezy.

If it was a zero knowledge, browsing opportunity, I'd just be inclined to buy a copy, but the Amazon reviews aren't all that positive either. I don't have any evidence to corroborate quality, but the list of books reviewed by the Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies looks quite interesting.

NMH: Medill, Storytelling & Technology

2003-10-29T22:55:00-05:00

As an adjunct to the Online News Association's annual conference, Medill is running a 1/2 day symposium on "Storytelling and New Technology", on November 16th. Despite the focus on academics and journalists, it should be accessible and entertaining to a general audience. If you're in or can get to Chicagoland, come on down.

You can't beat the price!!

King: 40% Broadband Penetration

2003-10-28T22:09:00-05:00

Andrew King (I'm assuming since he's the only named principal), of WebSiteOptimization.com is claiming that 40% of US Internet users now have broadband, with an increase of about 1% a year.

Shtull-Trauring: A DOM for Bad HTML

2003-10-28T22:06:00-05:00

Link parkin': Looks like the Twisted developers have come up with a Python library for dealing with ill formed HTML.

On the one hand, I had just recently been lamenting the fact that Python didn't have anything like Perl's HTML::Tree. On the other, I wonder how much of an inhale Twisted would be just to get that one module.

NMH: Medill Global Program Blog

2003-10-25T19:40:00-04:00

There's enough content now on the Medill Global Program's weblog, that I can delurk it. At least for the 5 or so people who read this weblog.

The blog is a low budget New Media Hack Production (TM), and a work in progress. No need to harsh on the design.

I'm just glad I helped get a distributed gaggle of international journalists giving us the back story on their experience.

Pilgrim: On Panther

2003-10-25T19:36:00-04:00

Mark Pilgrim gives a rundown, with copious screenshots, of new user interface and system management features in Mac OS X Panther.

Halavais: Blogosphere as Urban Space

2003-10-24T23:44:00-04:00

Link parkin: Alex Halavais posted his AOIR 4.0 conference paper and slides. I haven't had a chance to dig through them, but my read of the intro is that the current space of weblogs can be viewed in much the same fashion as unruly turn of the century cities. Cities which were eventually given shape and order by legendary urban planners. This suggests potential research directions regarding this media environment.

So where's the blogosphere's Daniel Burnham going to come from?

Johnson: Daily Us

2003-10-23T22:55:00-04:00

Steven Berlin Johnson coins the term Daily Us while reporting on Technorati's Breaking News feature to capture the democratic nature of using blogs to highlight news. Personally, I like "Daily We" better, but the article provides a nice overview of the current state and promise of the technique.

As for the actual practice? Well, even Johnson recognizes that Technorati is a bit spotty these days.

Menczer: Alternative Web Growth Models

2003-10-22T22:10:00-04:00

At least in the popular weblog consciousness, the Barabasi-Albert model of network growth is dominant. BA, for short, essentially claim that popular existing nodes get links from new nodes in proportion to their popularity. Rich get richer, power law, yadda yadda.

Besides skimpy supporting evidence (and no independent corroboration) I've always felt a bit uneasy accepting this model lock, stock, and barrel for weblogs and RSS feeds. Enter Filippo Menczer.

Menczer is a computer science and informatics professor at Indiana University. Among other interesting things (focused crawlers, data mining), he published a paper last year on a Web growth model based purely on local information. See the BA model implicitly assumes each new node has global information. While the model matches empirical data, it doesn't have much basis in reality.

Menczer not only proposes a new model that incorporates semantic distance as a linking factor, he also explores other alternative models for Web growth. In short, there's a number of different ways of explaining those "power laws" besides global popularity and this in fact has consequences for information seeking in such an environment.

Good stuff.

CSM: New RSS Feeds

2003-10-15T16:57:00-04:00

The Christian Science Monitor has some new RSS feeds. Normally this wouldn't be that big a deal, but they used their preexisting feed to let me know (see below). It would have been slightly better to include the feed url so I could immediately subscribe, but I thought it was unobtrusive and cool.

CSW: Sports Stats

2003-10-13T23:41:00-04:00

Link parkin: Being a bit of a sports geek, I've always wondered where you could get raw statistics if you actually wanted to do some analysis. Stats Inc and SportsTicker are pretty well known, but expensive. Computer Sports World stats look a bit more reasonable.

Update: The Sports Network also provides publisher friendly feeds, but like the rest you can't even get a sniff of their licensing.

Bray: FooCamp, Blogdex & Technorati

2003-10-12T10:52:00-04:00

Tim Bray is ensconced at O'Reilly's FooCamp. One session he attended was the Technorati/Blogdex death match. I'm always interested in any nuggets that come out about each of these services, because they're fairly opaque operation. Sure there's a gut sense of how they work (calculate degree rank of a site or post, provide interpretation), but if you know of any published literature on the hairy details I'd appreciate hearing about them.

While I find the services that Technorati and Blogdex provide interesting, I'm also interested in what exactly they're telling us. Hard to say without any details and also hard to independently verify.

Finally, one provocative thought from Bray: "It’s more important to know how popular something is than to know what it’s about."

Caldwell: Mac OS X Emacs

2003-10-11T13:26:00-04:00

I was just thinking today that WIBNI to have Emacs and Gnus to start reading mail on my TiBook. Entourage is really starting to give me a headache. Previous attempts to use Emacs on Jaguar were disappointing.

Then in my aggregator comes Mark Pilgrim pointing to David Caldwell's build of Emacs 21.3 for Aqua.

Serendipity baby.

GarageGames: Torque Game Engine

2003-10-10T18:24:00-04:00

Okay I've pretty much deep sixed my game engine hacking for ubicomp dreams, but every now and then something comes across the transom that's worthy of note.

Don't know how good GarageGames Torque Game Engine is but it must be halfway decent if Tribes 2 was done in it. The price ($100 USD) is pretty good. I wonder how extensible, if at all, the core engine is though.

Dreaming on...

Winer: BBC Feeds

2003-10-10T17:19:00-04:00

Link parkin: A while ago Dave Winer of UserLand posted a collection of the BBC's RSS feeds.

Siracusa: AlBook G4 Review

2003-10-09T23:10:00-04:00

John Siracusa writes some of the most in-depth, informative reviews I've ever seen. Recently he got a new Aluminum PowerBook G4 from Apple. The synopsis of his review? Lot's of minor niggling problems, but overall a keeper.

De Bra & Post: Fish-Search

2003-10-09T13:45:00-04:00

Link parkin: A blast from the past from 1994: Paul De Bra and Reinier Post's Fish-Search was one of the earliest manifestations of dynamic/focused crawling.

Interestingly, nine years ago the WWW Conference prominently included Mosaic as part of the title. Too bad client end innovation has pretty much ground to a halt.

Crivelli: PRC-Tools

2003-10-08T23:41:00-04:00

Kewl!! Zeno Crivelli has put together a Palm OS developers toolchain out of the GNU tools and running on Mac OS X.

Engst: TidBITS To WebCrossing

2003-10-08T23:33:00-04:00

Adam Engst is one of the proprietors of the Macintosh oriented TidBITS. He discusses their decision to move to WebCrossing as the basis of their content management.

This is no joke since TidBITS has 700 pre-existing back issues, and tons of readers. Probably a good case study for online production types.

Deatherage: Rantingprofs

2003-10-08T23:10:00-04:00

New to Me: Scott Detherage is yet another blogging Northwestern professor.

Except that all the posts are by Cori.

Hmmmmm.

Schudson: News, News Culture, Culture

2003-10-08T23:04:00-04:00

I just finished reading Michael Schudson's books, The Power of News and Discovering The News. I wasn't a mass communications major, so maybe these are standard reading for those types, but the texts should be on the list for anyone who seriously claims to be impacting the field of journalism.

Most salient point. Journalism and journalism culture have changed quite a bit in a relatively short period of time. The press we have today might actually be quite different in the future. Maybe in our lifetimes.

Baker: Paper Archives

2003-10-04T00:02:00-04:00

Link parkin: Ran across an archive of Henry Baker's papers. A young hacker could do worse than to read all of them closely.

Hemenway & Calishain: Spidering Hacks

2003-10-03T23:36:00-04:00

Link parkin': Spidering Hacks may have to go on the bookshelf. Maybe it has the answer to the question I've been pursuing for the past few days: Where can I get a decent, off-the-shelf, extensible Web spider/crawler? All I've seen with potential is Harvest-NG.

Hmmm, maybe I just have to change my Google search from "crawler" to "spider".

Perseus: Blog Survey

2003-10-03T23:23:00-04:00

Perseus Development Corporation conducted a survey of the weblog landscape. The methodology is not described in any way, but assuming the numbers are correct I'm not sure if they're dire or exciting.

The white paper notes a high level (66%) of abandonment. Basically there's been a lot of tire-kicking going on.

On the other hand, that's 66% of 4.12 million sites. So we're still talking over a million that are regularly maintained. Then again, maintained, here is a very loose term, including blogs that only update about once every two weeks.

Again, interesting numbers, but not enough context to be insightful. For example, what time scale is the study on and how do these numbers compare to the growth of other online communication tools.

I'm guessing answers to some of these questions can be had for a small fee.

Thanks to Scripting News, which has just rediscovered the concept of social capital.

SMC: Wi-Fi Multimedia Receiver

2003-10-02T22:01:00-04:00

Link parkin': Vendors such as SMC are starting to make it ridiculously easy to connect computers with home studios through devices like the EZ-Stream Universal Wireless Multimedia Receiver. Only downside I can see is that you may need proprietary software to stream to the device.

Chiariglione: Digital Media Manifesto

2003-10-02T21:57:00-04:00

I need to chew on this a bit, but Leonardo Chiariglione's Digital Media Manifesto may turn out to be a landmark effort. For those scoring at home, Chiariglione is a central figure in the development of digital media standards such as MP3 and MPEG4. He's got a little bit of credibility.

Blood: Participatory Media

2003-10-02T21:49:00-04:00

Dating back to July, but new to me, is Rebecca Blood's essay on how weblogging isn't journalism but has its true essence in discourse amongst engaged citizens. I've pretty much reached the same conclusion, but still think of weblogging as part of "The News". Those personalities striving to unify journalism and weblogging strike me as seeking validation through entry into a very guarded priesthood.

Lot's of other juicy bits too including the separation of the weblogging tools and content, and the potential for new Web native publishing forms. I would argue that photos and photo galleries will next find their natural authoring form on the Web. The outer limit is digital video. We can't do much more than put a big wad of bits up and either batch download them or stream them.

Tsai: SpamSieve

2003-10-02T21:32:00-04:00

Link parkin': I need to get serious about spam on my TiBook. I need Michael Tsai's SpamSieve.

Smith: Social Cyberspaces

2003-10-02T11:18:00-04:00

Link parkin: Marc Smith, Research Sociologist at Microsoft Research.

Batchelder: What is Metadata?

2003-10-01T21:40:00-04:00

Ned Batchelder discusses the definition of "metadata" and makes it much clearer then technologist's lame "data about data". Key bit, it's additional data separate from the original object.

Thanks to Simon Willison for the link.

Turnbull: In Other's Docks

2003-10-01T21:36:00-04:00

Giles Turnbull has gathered a nice collection of luminaries' MacOS X Dock contents. Since I was an Apple newbie, when I first got my TiBook, (2 years ago, wow has it been that long) I used to ask this question all the time. Turnbull's article just reaffirms that peeking over other's shoulders is oft a good idea.

Pratt: Xenoserver Virtualization

2003-09-30T23:16:00-04:00

Xen is virtualization technology similar to VMWare and VirtualPC. The Xenoserver project, led by Ian Pratt, generally seems to be much more focused on widely distributed, Grid style computing. They also made the interesting choice to eschew a host OS and require modifications to the virtualized OS kernel. This decision apparently leads to increased levels of performance.

von Behren, et. al.: Threads Harmless

2003-09-29T21:31:00-04:00

Link parkin': Rob von Behren, Jeremy Condit and Eric Brewer attempt to debunk John Ousterhout's long standing claim that most programmers really don't need threads. Their HotOS IX paper is entitled "Why Events Are A Bad Idea...".

Synopsis: it's a matter of poor implementation, not conceptual stupidity.

Hayes & Feenstra: Video ePaper

2003-09-28T17:32:00-04:00

Robert Hayes and B. J. Feenstra of Philips Research have devised a scheme for paper thin electronic displays that can refresh fast enough for video. The technique is first documented in the linked abstract from Nature, but the full article is behind a pay wall. However, Chappell Brown of EE Times has an indepth description of the core technique called "electrowetting".

At face value, this looks like something to experiment with for media companies with a 3 to 5 year outlook.

Chakrabarti: Focused Crawling

2003-09-26T23:09:00-04:00

Not hot off the research press, but I haven't seen Soumen Chakrabarti's idea of focused Web crawlers percolate into end user technology. Might be interesting to combine with an RSS aggregator.

Nokia: Goin' Nuts on Imaging

2003-09-25T23:22:00-04:00

Gizmodo has the summary of how Nokia (a phone company remember) is going berzerk on new products incorporating personal imaging.

Maki Enterprise: NewsFan

2003-09-25T23:11:00-04:00

NewsFan, yet another RSS aggregator hits the scene. Competition is starting to heat up in this space, even on Mac OS.

Pilgrim: Aggregator Client Requirements

2003-09-25T23:04:00-04:00

Link parkin': I was looking for Mark Pilgrim's demands of any RSS aggregator client, but couldn't find it. Mostly because I was looking for stuff related to robots.txt.

Thankfully, l. m. orchard just linked to it.

NMH: Time Limited Media Commons

2003-09-25T22:45:00-04:00

I had a mild epiphany while reading Lessig's "The Future of Ideas". What I've been advocating media companies do is take their archives, and permit free access, as Lessig defines free, for short periods of time. Instead of letting this stuff lie fallow, induce bursts of innovation with the material.

I'm not even thinking altruisticly. Media organizations could charge fees, and even keep the results, thus providing more grist for later mills.

Tricky bits: preventing excessive copyright infringement, and providing tools that encourage innovation.

The latter sounds like an interesting research question. Given what we now know about social structures, media, and innovation, is it possible to build culturally aware software that encourages creativity?

Kramer: Google News in Depth

2003-09-25T22:37:00-04:00

Over at the Online Journalism Review, Staci D. Kramer scores an interview with Krishna Bharat, creator of Google News.

Wow, Google News is only 1 year old.

Bowman & Willis: We Media

2003-09-25T22:34:00-04:00

Previously, the New Directions for News think tank produced a report on "participatory journalism", available in PDF. Now the authors of "We Media" have made it available in a much more Web friendly format.

Intelliseek: BlogPulse

2003-09-24T07:14:00-04:00

Link parkin': Yet another MetaWeblog Service, BlogPulse from Intelliseek. Looks like they specialize in applying natural language techniques to web collections.

Thanks to Scoble.

Bray: Clark & nXML

2003-09-24T00:29:00-04:00

According to Tim Bray, James Clark wrote over twelve thousand lines of Emacs Lisp to implement a full XML 1.0 processor as part of a new XML Emacs mode.

Sick.

Greenspun: On Lisp Diehards

2003-09-24T00:12:00-04:00

I don't know what's weirder, that PhilG would go to the extreme of comparing Lisp Diehards to Holocaust revisionists, or that his comments on the posting are surprisingly flame free.

Maybe that's the ultimate statement about the relevance of Lisp these days.

Hemera: AbleStock.com

2003-09-24T00:00:00-04:00

Link parkin': AbleStock.com is an accessible (not cheap) collection of stock images. Now if I could only find a good collection of stock computer related illustrations and figures.

Google: Search By Location

2003-09-23T23:48:00-04:00

Link parkin': Google Labs is experimenting with searching by location.

Pasick: Swarming TV Shows

2003-09-22T10:52:00-04:00

Adam Pasick, a correspondent for Reuters, documents the usage of BitTorrent to share recordings of TV shows. Ultimately, I think this might be a means by which smaller news organizations could distribute rich media. Using such technologies let's them handle potential Slashdot rushes, but doesn't force them to hitch their wagon to Akamai.

Haertle & Dalhausen: PyGallery

2003-09-22T10:44:00-04:00

Link parkin': PyGallery is a Python based image gallery tool written by Kevin Dalhausen and Daniel Haertle.

Gillmor: Harnessing Blogrolls

2003-09-21T14:31:00-04:00

Link parkin': Steve Gillmor latches onto a good idea, services based upon looking at sets of subscriptions, blogrolls, and reading behavior. Warning: buzzword compliant and ridiculously optimistic about the transformative properties of RSS.

NMH: Daypop News, Way Broken

2003-09-20T12:46:00-04:00

I subscribe to Daypop top 10 news in my favorite RSS aggregator. I've been somewhat suspicious of what comes across the feed though.

Today, half of the top 10 pointed to Salon section fronts, e.g. Salon.com Books. What gives? Is Salon really that popular amongst bloggers?

Digging through the citations I discovered that all of the references came from Salon blogs. The default template for the service links to those section fronts.

This puts a bit of a damper on the "collective wisdom of bloggers" trope kicking around. Granted this is probably a case of initial conditions (not enough input), but if people are going to be seriously relying on Daypop or similar services there's a lot of room for improvement.

Duck as people start firing off "So do better!"

McCloud: On Micropayments

2003-09-20T12:29:00-04:00

Scott McCloud, argues eloquently for the potential of micropayment schemes. In particular, he makes a case against Clay Shirky's clams that micropayments are dead.

My quick react is that the two are talking past each other. Shirky seems to be fighting against an automated, metering scheme, called micropayments, that enables content producers to maximize the value of their production. McCloud seems to be fighting for an explicit transaction scheme for low pricing, called micropayments, that enables content producers to recover some of the value of their production. Ed. this may need revision.

Same planet, different worlds.

Richardson: Broadband Penetration #s

2003-09-19T10:08:00-04:00

Over at The Register, Tim Richardson reports some interesting broadband penetration numbers. There are 20 million broadband lines in the US. Don't know what that translates to in terms of households or users, but that's a nontrivial (but small) number. And there's double digit growth in both DSL and cable.

He also relays that the ITU is claiming one in ten Net users worldwide has broadband. Again, small but non-trivial.

Apple: New 15" Laptops

2003-09-18T21:13:00-04:00

Yes this announcement was a few days ago, but at long last, a new AlBook that I'd actually put down hard earned money for

Bar-Yossef & Rajagopalan: Template Detection

2003-09-16T23:33:00-04:00

If you do any web indexing or information retrieval on HTML, templates can easily screw things up. Results from WWW 2002 indicate that there's hope for detecting and leveraging template elements.

Key nuggets use tree structure, administrative authority, and link occurrence counts to find the recurring elements. Also, it can be done reasonably fast, with standard RDBMS technology.

Huberman & Adamic: Network Infodynamics

2003-09-16T22:45:00-04:00

A new (at least to me) social networking paper from folks at HP's Information Dynamics Laboratory, Bernardo Huberman and Lada Adamic. "Information Dynamics in the Networked World."

You know, if you really want to be on the leading edge of this stuff, you need to keep an eye on the physicists. That is if you can handle the math.

Update: Alex Halavais e-mailed to chide me for possibly slighting any traditional social network analysts out there. No slight intended, those folks have been on the leading edge of this stuff for decades. Hope you're not in a tizzy!

Leung: RSS Bandwidth is a Problem

2003-09-16T22:30:00-04:00

I *think* Ted Leung is taking issue with my recent posting regarding RSS bandwidth. I got linked, but "Quite a few people have posted" on the issue.

We agree on one thing, RSS bandwidth could be a major issue if aggregator usage explodes. And I also agree that's definitely going to happen, not even a probable.

However, it should be clear that part of the success of RSS is that by using HTTP, publishing RSS is damn easy for authors. Combined with loose formats that means transforming plain old HTML into a feed is trivial. Ergo, lots of content for all those aggregators. It's something of a virtuous cycle.

Why is this an issue for solving the bandwidth problem? Any solution will need content providers to buy in. If you're going to try and pry them off of HTTP, well good luck.

Lastly, my comment about RSS being a small part of HTTP traffic, is targeted towards my own "fancy P2P schemes" thinking. Knuth's commentary about "premature optimization" was chiming in the back of my head.

In summary, I'm not saying RSS bandwidth isn't or won't be a problem, just that whizzy non-HTTP solutions have a low chance of success. IMHO.

Memo to self: someone needs to do a traffic characterization study across a wide range of HTTP/RSS feeds.

Nichani & Rajamanickam: Classifying Interactive Explanations

2003-09-16T21:50:00-04:00

Maish Nichani and Venkat Rajamanickam have examined a number of interactive presentations, including a few on news sites, and come up with a simple classification scheme.

Looks like a promising start, might be worth comparing with Nora Paul's attempts to come up with the "elements of interaction". Also, I might add a "comparative" category, that works through contrast and comparison, especially of images.

Thanks to the WebWord.com Weblog

Thomson: RSS Comic Strips

2003-09-13T19:07:00-04:00

David Thomson, a.k.a. dwlt.net, is providing Tapestry, which serves a number of comic strips through RSS. As a bonus, he has a nice catalog of RSS aggregators.

One more section for the RSS Newspaper.

Rosen: PressThink

2003-09-13T19:03:00-04:00

Wow! Jay Rosen, the chair of the journalism program at NYU, has been keeping a pretty spiffy MT based blog.

Kaufmann: On Sports Blogging

2003-09-12T09:51:00-04:00

King Kaufman, in Salon, writes about the disparity between the number of baseball and football bloggers. Conclusion: baseball has a daily rhythm, plenty of stats, and a literary tradition that all lend to decentralized, non-professional commentary. However, I was interested enough to get a daypass just to find out where these blogs are.

Why? With decent sports blogging, you could probably synthesize all the sections of USA Today out of RSS feeds. There's plenty of US politics related feeds for the front page, the BBC's RSS provides a pretty good start to an international section, you can get A&E to whatever granularity you want, and sports would almost complete the mix. Tech business falls out pretty well, but I'm not sure about more general economic/business reporting even in the vicinity of The Wall Street Journal. Maybe that could be cobbled out of vertical industry feeds.

Just a thought.

Memo to self: isn't it about time for someone to predict the death of Salon again?

Memo to Salon: Your RSS feed headlines are slowly sucking me in. Must... resist... subscribing...

sjdesign: Back Office Bag

2003-09-12T07:50:00-04:00

The Big BackOffice computer backpack by Shaun Jackson Design is one of the few I've seen recently that I might actually buy. I've got a bandolier style that's been serviceable for the past couple of years, but I really prefer double straps. Most of the stuff I've seen out there are courier cargo bags, which are okay for short trips and light loads. But I tend to carry a couple of books in addition to my TiBook, which adds up quick, and screws up your neck and shoulder just as fast.

Ogbuji: State of Python & XML

2003-09-11T07:58:00-04:00

Also thanks to Ted, Uche Ogbuji on "The State of the Python-XML Art"

Bowers: RSS Bandwidth Efficiency

2003-09-11T07:55:00-04:00

Jeremy Bowers makes a number of good points about how current usage of RSS is pretty wasteful of bandwidth. He even proposes using rproxy to improve the situation.

Sometimes I think this is an interesting problem to tackle. Yesterday, I was cooking up fancy P2P schemes for scalable, persistent distribution of RSS fragments. Not an original idea, but just something to kick around.

Then I remember that a) RSS traffic is still ridiculously small relative to regular HTTP traffic and b) part of RSS's popularity is that it does just use HTTP.

It's a format optimized for publishers not consumers, so if you want to fix any problems you'll really have to start at that end of the pipe.

Thanks to Ted Leung

Futures Lab: Access Grid

2003-09-10T21:07:00-04:00

Link parkin': The Access Grid Project. Since it looks like I'll be working with these guys.

MIT-Stanford Vlab: Social Software $$

2003-09-09T14:10:00-04:00

Uh, oh. Here come the venture capitalists.

Social Software == Internet Hype 2.0?!!

Discuss.

An observation though. All of the software being discussed only makes minimal use of the lessons of social network and computing research. Friendster strikes me as a triumph of marketing and cultural fascination than being revolutionary from a technological or sociological standpoint.

Then again, Tim Berners-Lee didn't know much about hypertext either.

Bombich: Carbon Copy Cleaner

2003-09-08T23:10:00-04:00

Link parkin': Carbon Copy Cleaner, for when I get the dough to upgrade my TiBook.

Pearson: Ecosystem Data

2003-09-08T18:27:00-04:00

Philip Pearson of Second p0st has been gathering weblog network data.

SFSU: XPress Online

2003-09-08T09:45:00-04:00

I've been trying to sow the seeds for moving the Medill News Service CMS to Movable Type. [X]Press Online, out of San Francisco State University's journalism program, looks like a nice example of what can be done. Link parkin' for future case making.

Creative Commons: Movie Contest

2003-09-07T11:02:00-04:00

Need content? Run a contest!. Ditto if you've got content.

Refining my creative contests trope, organizations with extensive content archives should be doing exactly what Creative Commons is doing. And on a regular basis.

Yeah there's some work in screening the submissions, but you get fresh, cheap content, you get a closer connection to your audience (both creatives and passive observers), and you get targeted (read more lucrative) opportunities for sponsorship and advertising.

Heck, depending on the material you could argue that it's journalism, giving more nuance, context, and perspective to stories.

Rojas: Digital Technics

2003-09-06T22:02:00-04:00

Peter Rojas of Gizmodo sparks the techno lust with a report that Technics is inching towards a device with the SL1200 form factor, but really digital inside.

Imagine the cool points for hacking that. Talk about getting brothers into software...

Want: Mobile Personal Server

2003-09-06T21:57:00-04:00

Acknowledging the limitations of a house interview, Intel's piece on Roy Want and the personal server is interesting. For what it leaves out.

Slap Bluetooth on an iPod and don't you have a personal server? Want's a smart guy, and there's smart folks in the group, but what's in the article doesn't sound particularly challenging.

Also, I'm wondering if users will really bite on a device that is always dependent on other components. Strikes me you'll have to attach some kind of I/O just so the server isn't rendered completely useless in places where it's inconvenient to install the supporting technology. Maybe the deal is to make the server fit in your shoe (a non starter unless you expect to wear the same shoes every day), make the cell phone the minimal I/O device, and then if you get in presentation rich spaces interact.

Okay now there are issues.

And making the server into jewelry (ring, bracelet, belt buckle) might be a better bet.

Parks: Shrook

2003-09-05T07:50:00-04:00

Link parkin': Shrook is yet another RSS aggregator. However, this looks like it might actually be competition for NetNewsWire.

Glaser: Online News Pioneers

2003-09-05T00:01:00-04:00

Mark Glaser, writing for Online Journalism Review, has shipped the first part of a two part series on folks who've been doing newsish things on the web for 10 years. Apparently, there was no news on the Web until the University of Florida did a journalism web site.

Anyhoo, Glaser's first chunk features interviews with John Battle, Ana Marie Cox, Bernard Gwertzman, Craig Newmark, and Dave Winer. Check out the article if you don't know who they are.

I found Ann O'Tate, er Cox, to be the most cogent of the bunch. "That said, I think what's really revolutionary about weblogs isn't their content..."

Moment of silence for Suck. I've still got various tchotchkes they gave away. Sniff.

Where's the Suck for the new millenium when you need it?

NMH: Commodity Virtual Servers

2003-09-03T22:36:00-04:00

Link parkin': JohnCompanies, JVDS.

Both of these guys provide virtual servers (Linux and/or FreeBSD) to the public.

JohnCompanies?: $65 a month, to start. Nice!

JVDS?: $15 a month to get going. Yowsa!!

I'd have to look at the performance numbers, but, there's basically no need to fork over any money to Dell (or anyone else) until you:

Need desktop graphics
Need privacy
Need high performance
Need a Microsoft OS

Frankly, for anybody who's time is worth anything and knows (or can learn) an open os, you'll recoup the costs in admin hassles.

The entry cost of owning your own server is near zero.

Thanks to 0xDECAFBAD.

Jain: Blogstreet

2003-09-03T15:27:00-04:00

Link parking: Blogstreet, yet another MetaWeblogService (MWS) to steal a term from the Waypath guys.

Thanks to Scoble for the reminder.

NYTimes: Discussing Photos

2003-09-03T15:25:00-04:00

Another note from the CyberJournalist.Net bulletin (still digging through leftover honeymoon e-mail), mentions that The New York Times online is now doing a "week in photos" feature. The new wrinkle, since MSNBC and The Washington Post do this already, is audio commentary from the photographers and photo editors.

Excellent use of the infinite news hole. Also, mining photo archives, either internally or by outside users, could make those extra images productive. As a great historical opportunity, why not give the world some kind of access to all of those unused 9/11 photos?

Memo to self: a serious study of photo archive usage on news websites would be a good capstone project.

Batagelj & Mrvar: Pajek for Network Analysis

2003-09-02T22:41:00-04:00

Pajek looks like a pretty good tool for analyzing really big networks.

Thanks for the tip from Blog De Halavais.

Udell: RSS for E-mail, Bah!

2003-08-29T17:36:00-04:00

Jon Udell echoes the silent majority in saying, "There's been a lot of talk about replacing email with RSS. I don't buy it." RSS is overkill to deal with ad-hoc, unsolicited, one-to-one communication.

So you say it can be fixed up? Well let me put it to you this way. If you thought the Necho/Pie/RSS/funky feed wars were meanspirited, tedious, and unproductive, imagine the same debates with billions of dollars at stake. For every RSS user currently, there must be 100's, if not thousands of SMTP/IMAP users.

Actually, it wouldn't be much of a war, because Microsoft would take the opportunity presented by the confusion created in overhauling the system to stamp out all the other e-mail vendors.

E-mail is too big to fail.

Google: Friends Newsletter

2003-08-29T17:14:00-04:00

I've been digging through some old e-mail, that went unattended during my wedding buildup. One piece was a CyberJournalist.Net alert that pointed to a short interview with Krishna Bharat, principal genius behind Google News. Of course it's in the Google-Friends Newsletter so it's a bit of a softball, but still, interesting insights into how the dang thing works.

Heck, I didn't even know there was a Google-Friends Newsletter.

Waypath: Yet Another Dex

2003-08-28T22:12:00-04:00

Squirreled away in JD Lasica's blog is a link to Waypath, yet another in the crop of indexing engines for weblogs. Definitely a bit less publicized than its counterparts: Blogdex, Daypop, Technorati, et. al.

Update: The Waypath archives contain links to a whole bunch of other metaweblog (as the Waypath folks put it) services. June looks particularly ripe.

Memo to self: check to see if weblogs.com and blo.gs got pinged.

Bergman: Competing for Last

2003-08-27T16:03:00-04:00

Somewhat stale, but still new to me is a piece Cory Bergman penned over at the The Lost Remote. Entitled, "Competing for Last Place" it posits that competition in the news industry actually breeds a deadly sameness. To succeed newsrooms need to strike and cover the same old stories, but with unique angles.

Bergman is mostly focusing on TV newsrooms but in the short term, the thinking is also applicable to news web sites. After being burnt in the mid-90's by wacky innovations (anyone remember the Chicago Tribune's old TV/Flash like front page), news sites on the Web have slowed down the innovation. They're all starting to look like the front of the NY Times.

On the web though, there's still plenty of room to do interesting things, especially in providing services for end users and developers to build on, and still look like everyone else, e.g. Yahoo! News providing RSS feeds.

Yahoo: RSS News Feeds

2003-08-26T18:07:00-04:00

Soon to be making the rounds, Yahoo is now providing RSS feeds for its news pages.

NMH: NewsGator Scriptable?

2003-08-26T14:40:00-04:00

Thinking out loud. NewsGator is an RSS aggregator embedded within Outlook. I haven't looked recently, but I bet Outlook is still scriptable, probably still with VisualBasic for applications. This probably means one can trawl over at least some of NewsGator's data about your feeds.

Jon: Yet Another Blog Index

2003-08-25T10:09:00-04:00

By dint of poking around in Daypop's citations I ran across Nicholas Jon's blogosphere.us. On the surface, blogosphere.us looks to be similar to Blogdex and Daypop, but as is usual, its techniques aren't documented.

Update: found a bit more info in another somewhat incestuous article, and its more detailed version.

Careful readers will note the implication that Daypop uses sites that index citations as part of its citation count (apparently). Whether this is a good idea or not is left as an exercise to the reader.

Awasu: Scriptable RSS Aggregator

2003-08-24T19:32:00-04:00

While kludging together an RSS aggregator isn't all that difficult, I'm coming to the realization that implementing one I'd like to use every day is a challenging task. Yet for some of my research, I'd really like to modify the behavior of an RSS aggregator.

NetNewsWire already integrates AppleScript. So now I'm casting about for extensible aggregators under Windows. Awasu is the first one I've run across, although I need to dig into the other .Net based contenders, like SharpReader. Some of them, such as FeedReader and Syndirella are open source, so maybe I can hack in my own extensibility.

Jenkins: Email, Google, and Microsoft

2003-08-23T19:11:00-04:00

While the spirit of Elwyn Jenkins, "Email, Google, Microsoft and the Lack of Diversity" is commendable, the piece is chock full of bad argumentation. I'll probably do a careful analysis, but statements like:

The problem with email is that every email client works much the same way regardless of who constructed it...

are just silly. Is there any non-Microsoft e-mail client that 's responsible for spreading viruses? Heck, even newer versions of Outlook (from Microsoft itself) have script execution (the main virus transmission mechanism) turned off by default.

Gartner & Berkman: Copyright Post-Napster

2003-08-23T18:57:00-04:00

Parking for later perusal: Copyright and Digital Media in a Post-Napster World.

Hunsinger: Damn Good Paper Idea

2003-08-22T22:12:00-04:00

Jeremy Hunsinger writes a fictitious abstract regarding a paper that needs to be written by someone. The investigation would involve the validation/debunking of the Weblog power law meme and its implications. Alex Halavais provided the connection to Hunsinger's idea and amplified on the theme.

I completely agree with both gentlemen and would hasten to add that whatever one's stance in this debate, the foundations are still shaky. The methodology and data both strike me as bit suspect. There hasn't really been any independent validation. Also, the time varying aspects of these networks should prove interesting under scrutiny. Other than Andy Tomkins and crew, there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of action in this space.

Raynes: MTOtherBlog

2003-08-21T21:53:00-04:00

I'm starting to hack on reengineering the Medill News Service CMS to be built on top of Movable Type. Numerous benefits should accrue.

However, there's a tiny problem. The MNS CMS relies on a concept of beats to categorize the articles. I'd like to have each beat correspond to its own blog. Then there could be a "front page" blog that pulls from the various beat blogs. Unfortunately, the tags to pull entries from other blogs isn't baked into stock MT.

Enter David Raynes' MTOtherBlog plugin for Movable Type. Looks like it fits the bill.

Of course occasionally you'll want to grab from a merged view of a set of blogs. For that there's the Global Listings plugin from Stepan Riha.

Best Hawk Harrelson voice: I luv Movable Type extensions.

Dash: Web Tools Adapt

2003-08-20T23:08:00-04:00

Anil Dash, in "Crossing the Threshold", succinctly captures something that had been kicking around in my head:

Web-based writing tools tend to be the opposite of desktop writing tools in the sense that the tools form around the ways people write, instead of the desktop application model, where the tool informs and influences the works that are created with it.

MovableType is what FrontPage should have been.

I'll add a minor contribution to this train of thought. Eventually the ways people read and write with Web tools will filter back to the desktop. For example, RSS aggregators got a kick start be having HTTP/HTML frontends (cf Radio Userland, AmphetaDesk). Now desktop versions are coming back with a vengeance (cf NetNewsWire, FeedDemon).

A thesis. Web development is so constrained that it forces developers to have a clear data model and be on task regarding the task.

Also, Web development really supports rapid, iterative prototyping. Granted, hitting reload isn't as much fun as a Common Lisp REPL, but it beats compile/link/debug.

I wonder if there are any companies out there working with a "prototype on the Web/deliver on the desktop" model. Strikes me as a possible winner.

And another nugget. If you believe Dash, bake extensibility into your app from the get go. This allows the tool to adapt to how people write. That may seem obvious, but you'd be surprised how many young developers have to be convinced that extensibility is a good idea.

Dyson: XML and PostgreSQL

2003-08-19T23:11:00-04:00

Just thinking out loud, but I wonder if the combination of PostgreSQL and XML would make the foundation of a good weblog/RSS social network crawler.

NMH: Back...

2003-08-19T23:05:00-04:00

caught you looking for the same thing. Now for something a bit different.

Had a fabulous time Down Under (TM) and highly recommend it. The picture below is of my lovely wife of roughly 3 weeks. When in Sydney, be sure to have a nice lunch at the Museum of Contemporary Art's outdoor cafe, as we did. The cafe is right on the Circular Quay.
.

The food was tasty, the wine good, and the service excellent. Despite the fact that the poor gentleman in the background had red wine spilled on him by a waitress.

A full glass actually.

On his jacket and shirt.

But it's a really nice restaurant, trust me!

NMH: No Worries

2003-08-01T20:44:00-04:00

Howdy folks! For all 1.5 of my readers out there, this is just a little notice that I've been busy getting married, which explains last week's outage. Now I'm halfway around the world in Australia enjoying my honeymoon, which will explain the next two weeks. Don't expect anything new until August 18th at the earliest.

As an aside, looks like wireless Internet access hasn't quite struck down under yet. But they've got Web based cybercafes up the wazoo, at least in Melbourne so far.

Cheers!!

Hudson: PyNewbie Nuggets

2003-07-23T16:47:00-04:00

While I wish they were broken out into a separate category, Rob Hudson's tutorials on Python programming look quite nice.

In related news, Bruce Eckel is a big Python fan too.

NMH: Archives Housekeeping

2003-07-21T16:38:00-04:00

On the off chance that anyone even bothered to look, the formerly pathetic monthly and individual archives of this weblog have now been given a decent presentation.

The CSS stylesheets used are modifcations of Firda Beka's old CSS Colouring Book stylesheets.

Still some tweaking to go though. Recent entries doesn't work how I would like it to for older archive entries, I want to implement a daily archive, and integrate some Mason hackery.

Orchard: XmlRpcToWiki

2003-07-21T11:24:00-04:00

One of the things that sort of turned me off on wikis is their lack of programmatic control. For example, many weblog tools support a remote procedure call mechanism through XML-RPC. Similarly, Movable Type has a ridiculously beautiful Perl API.

But it looks like my wiki hangups may have been addressed by l. m. orchard, who's been hacking modules for programmatic wiki control using XML-RPC. Orchard has code that works with three popular wiki packages: Twiki, UseModWiki, and MoinMoin.

Putting it all together, automated tools can watch personal writing spaces (weblogs) and write into public writing spaces (wikis). Now we just need some smarts to know when to do so.

Salz: RSS Tech Details

2003-07-20T21:36:00-04:00

Rich Salz covers the technical details, plusses, and minuses of RSS. Among a bunch of other issues, Salz highlights one that got swept under the rug in all of the political wrangling: HTML/XML embedded in RSS feeds. Salz points out that the Atom (nee NEcho) format at least cleanly handles this problem.

This is a fairly important issue for RSS as the final result can make it either much easier or harder for tools to deal with the format. However, as discussion within the NEcho community shows, there's not an obvious solution.

Segrest: Safari MT Bookmarklet

2003-07-19T12:45:00-04:00

The default Movable Type bookmarklets break in Apple's Safari browser. Jen Segrest has a Post-It! bookmarklet that works properly. Over at randomWalks, the bookmarklet has been slightly tweaked to take advantage of selected text.

Note that these also seem to work with OmniWeb, which is now back on my browser radar, since it uses WebKit, the Safari core. OmniWeb now seems sprightlier and still as beautiful as ever. Downside is that it doesn't do tabbed browsing. Way upside is the rediscovery of shortcuts in the URL entry field.

Hewitt: Newspapers & Blogs

2003-07-18T21:59:00-04:00

Hugh Hewitt, in a Weekly Standard article, makes a case for official nurturing of blogging within news organizations. Frankly, it's not all that compelling. Using blogs as a farm system exhibits too much effort for widely varying results. Besides, the help can always go free agent or freelance with little or no effort.

Here's the NMH argument for weblogs in news organizations. Kovach & Rosenstiel's highly regarded book, The Elements of Journalism, makes transparency a fundamental property of the journalistic process. Weblogs can be a convenient and cheap mechanism by which a news organization can demonstrate more transparency. A web based ombudsman could react almost instantaneously and in much more depth than the editorial page would allow. Motivated newsroom staff could also use weblogs to be proactive instead of reactive. This can lead to an increased reputation, which is generally more profitable.

Let's see some newspaper bean counter or hard bitten ink stained editor argue against that.

Japan Times: Wi-Fi Megapixel Camera

2003-07-17T19:18:00-04:00

Fuji announced a new megapixel camera with built-in Wi-Fi, according to the Japan Times. The biggest reason seemed to be cable elimnation.

Thanks to Gizmodo

Mogharabi: MNS on Blogs

2003-07-17T10:10:00-04:00

Shabnam Mogharabi, of the Medill News Service (MNS), called me up last week, and did a brief one-on-one regarding blogs. I'm not sure what's more gratifying, that I actually got quoted or that the article is published on the Web using software who's construction I guided. The Chicago Medill News Service uses a homegrown CMS that a series of undergraduate independent studies have built and maintained. It's not a paragon of software development, but it gets the job done.

Even better, I first saw the article in my RSS aggregator, although we're not publicizing the feeds yet. First off, they ain't quite valid yet, and second we need to make sure we don't scoop the MNS clients.

However, now that I've been mentioned in the same article as Dave Winer, it might be time to don my asbestos suit. Not blaming Dave, but he does seem to be something of a heat magnet.

Finally, Mogharabi's story has a nice roundup of Chicago area blogging activities. Lots of local flavor I didn't know about myself.

Memo to self: for vanity's sake find out what clients picked up the article

Khopkar, et. al: Search Engine Personalization

2003-07-15T01:25:00-04:00

A FirstMonday article in which the investigators document the extent which the likes of Yahoo!, AOL, and Lycos provide personalization features.

Thanks to WebWord.

Haughey: Making MT Roll Over

2003-07-15T00:59:00-04:00

Matt Haughey, of MetaFilter fame, uses Movable Type in all sorts of interesting ways. Clearly, I'm also a big MT fan, but Haughey misses another significant limitation of the system: the user model is a little too primitive. For example, I've banged my head against per user information for extensions. Not fun, but doable. This strikes me as something that Six Apart should bake in in a cleaner fashion.

And another thing, can the operation of the template system be described as anything but opaque. The documentation provides surface sense for simple things, but multiple templates of different types can be treacherous.

Memo to self: kwit yer bitchin.

MIN: Glamour Gets 10,000 Free Writers

2003-07-14T23:52:00-04:00

In MIN (Media Industry Newsletter by Steve Cohn), it's revealed that a writing contest sponsored by Glamour magazine, drew 10,000 entrants!.

Just doing a little math, if only 1% of them are any good, that's 100 good chunks of new magnet content. Toss in a kickoff and a wrapup week, and you've got 1 year's worth of engaging material, releasable once a week, for free!!

Even better Glamour didn't have to ante up any archival content. Heck the dang contest was probably a low tech combo of snail mail and e-mail.

I'm telling ya, the gold in that there content is time limited, focused activities around select bits and topics. People everywhere have something to say about something. Just give 'em a venue and don't ask that they do it every day. People got lives ya know!

Price: ResoureShelf

2003-07-13T21:44:00-04:00

JD Lasica reminds folks of Gary Price's excellent ResourceShelf web site, focusing on Internet search technology, information systems, and library science.

Of recent interest on Price's site is that the Stanford PageRank crew seems to be cooking up personalized search techniques.

Lago: OS X Blogging Clients

2003-07-12T18:39:00-04:00

Getting closer to the ability to turn a digital photo into a microblog, and now I'm looking for blogging clients. Lago has a nice rundown of blogging clients for OS X. One noticeable omission is Chronicle Lite, maybe because it's a Java client and not Mac OS X specific. Also, I don't think ThinBlog was included.

Park: Newspapers, Things and Places

2003-07-12T15:09:00-04:00

Don Park rediscovers "demassification" as John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid termed the effect in a paper called "Borderlands". In short, a physical newspaper has the nice property that if you and I have seen the newspaper, even if it's different copies, we've seen the "same" thing. Thus references to elements of the paper are consistent across its various instances.

This all falls apart for personalized online "newspapers". Eventually we'll discover that these things are a new and different service. Starting from newspaper principles, conceptions, and expectations is fine, but we'll have to make a new understanding of the way they should work.

Caveat: newspapers used to issue multiple editions per day so the demassification argument only goes so far. TV broadcast is harder to demassify, although with TiVo and intermediaries like it probably being cooked up in somebody's lab even that medium is under assault.

Memo to audience: I'll fix up the Seely Brown/Duguid reference when I get back to my office.

AbsInt: aiSee Graph Viz SW

2003-07-10T12:28:00-04:00

aiSee London, aiSee France...

I'm turning into a graph geek but still don't have a good graph visualization tool on the box. A German company named AbsInt produces aiSee, a commercially maintained cross platform, graph visualization application. aiSee isn't free as in beer or free as in freedom, but it looks pretty damn good, and it's not too expensive for academic use.

Washington Post: Iraq Photoshows

2003-07-10T00:20:00-04:00

Mainly parking, but it looks like The Washington Post has put together an incredible Flash based compendium of photographs from their embedded journalists. This could be another great example of multimedia storytelling.

Borin: MRAM

2003-07-10T00:13:00-04:00

Elliot Borin reports on a new technology that's sounds too damned good to be true: MRAM. Faster than current RAM technologies, non-volatile, and occupying less physical space. Due by the end of 2003. It would seem to be an ideal replacement for RAM in desktop machines much less PDAs and cell phones as mentioned in the article.

However, I didn't see one other relevant factor mentioned: cost. Betcha the stuff ain't cheap.

NMH: Progress

2003-07-09T23:57:00-04:00

Just beat the deadline to keep the posting streak alive, but it was due to some good developments.

Azzari Caillier passed her qualifying exam this week. She's an advisee of mine and currently the furthest along towards completing her degree. The exam committee grilled her for over 3 hours, but she came through with flying colors.
I've made some progress on turning media objects into microblogs. There should be a demo link coming in a few days.
I had a blast showing a few journalism students the wonders of Gallery to a bunch of New Media Capstone students. That got them jazzed about thinking of ways to use it in their course project.

Fleishman: Chicagoland McD's Wi-Fi

2003-07-09T23:52:00-04:00

McDonald's is planning a big rollout of Wi-Fi in SF and Chicago. According to Glenn Fleishman, a few local area franchisees have jumped the gun already and are providing it for free.

Memo to Chicago Sun Times: I'd link to you but I know you have baked in linkrot.

Update: Fixed up a few character's in GlennF's name.

Bray & Appnel: Blogging APIs

2003-07-08T13:54:00-04:00

Two Tims provide good entry points for the recent upheavals and forward motion around blogging APIs. Bray argues that REST is beautiful baby. Meanwhile, Appnel claims that SOAP ain't all that hard. I strongly concur with the former sentiment.

Meanwhile, Joe Gregorio pushes on the development of a certified, standard RESTLog API, and Mark Pilgrim illustrates the API's elegance.

Raynes & Beeson: MT Plugin Manager

2003-07-08T13:47:00-04:00

Haven't downloaded yet, but the MT Plugin Manager looks like an extension of the Movable Type application object (didn't know you could do that didya) to provide a nice Web front-end to the installed MT plug-ins. I wonder if you can upload plug-ins remotely (modulo hairy security issues).

Hespos: Local Blogging

2003-07-08T12:53:00-04:00

Tom Hespos makes a good case for using blogs to cover local news, especially for underserved communities. Three major challenges are presented:

Content tracking (finding what's important locally)
Relevance tools (finding locally relevant stuff globally)
An advertising model (getting local advertisers paid)

By the end of the summer, I think I'll have prototype solutions to the first two.

Memo to self: lock the term "underserved communities" into the talking points

Orchard: WeblogWithWiki

2003-07-07T19:00:00-04:00

l.m. Orchard has been maintaining a wiki page covering how to merge weblogs and wikis. In particular, he himself has done it for Movable Type.

Jarvis: AOL Bloggging

2003-07-06T17:51:00-04:00

The BuzzMachine, Jeff Jarvis, discusses his recent visit to AOL to see their blogging tools. It's been known for a while that AOL was going to give their members blogging tools. From Jarvis' report version 1.0 might not suck and may actually be nicely integrated with other AOL services, e.g. AIM.

Grosso: What's A Camera?

2003-07-05T18:11:00-04:00

As should have been anticipated, phone cameras are leading to a much different form of behavior than traditional cameras or even digital cameras. People really are capturing the moment. Japanese women snapping photos of magazines right in the bookstore and geeks imaging slides right in the middle of a conference.William Grosso asks, "what is a camera, anyway?"

The key distinction of a phone camera is that it's intimately integrated with a communication device. If you investigate the user's mental model, they're not "taking photos", they're "sending messages". Which is why folks focused strictly on the photographic quality of these devices just won't get it.

So maybe Grosso's question should be, "why do we even call them cameras?".

NMH: Cubs vs Cards

2003-07-04T12:17:00-04:00

Off to see the Cubs and Cards at Wrigley today. Can't get a much more Americana filled event than that.

Engineered Audio: MyRadioStation

2003-07-03T16:07:00-04:00

Engineered Audio is planning to ship a device that hooks up to a computer's USB or audio out port, and transmits over an FM radio frequency. Sounds like just enough to manufacture your own little, local radio station using whatever content you'd like. Remote controllable from anywhere on the Internet.

Of course some folks note that this sounds like a great idea in theory, but may not actually work well in practice.

Gemmell: MyLifeBits

2003-07-03T15:48:00-04:00

Digging about for current knowledge regarding image annotation mechanisms, I Googled across Jim Gemmell's publications regarding MyLifeBits. The MyLifeBits project is essentially a bid to construct Vannevar Bush's Memex. Run out of MicroSoft's Bay Area Research Center, there's a big emphasis on RDBMS technology. Interestingly, I think Gemmell eschews embedding annotations in the actual media.

For some gut reason, this model gives me the willies. If you embed the annotations in the image (easier said than done) if you have the image you have the metadata, and there's no single point of failure. Also, the data is separated from the name of the object. However, doing queries is way easier, and that actually may be a big enough win.

Unfortunately, the relative lameness of embedded image annotation mechanisms is driving me to this mode of operation anyway.

NMH: Media Artifacts as Microblogs?

2003-07-02T23:03:00-04:00

Epiphany moment on the train home today. Take a bunch of media objects, a collection of digital photographs say. Make each one a microblog (riffing off of Don Park's idea of Micro-Wiki's) by having it support the RESTLog API, in addition to its standard representation.

For example, each image can be served as a plain old image, but you tweak its URL a bit and you can post to it. Do a get from another tweaked URL and you get back HTML. Another tweak, and you get the RSS. You can also make each object support TrackBacks for two way linking and annotation.

Now build all sorts of tools using standard Web and WebService toolkits. Mayhem ensues.

Gotta get to work.

Sherman: About.com as weblog

2003-07-02T22:56:00-04:00

About.com has quietly turned all of its sites into weblogs using MovableType, according to Howard Sherman. As he points out, this is a vote of confidence for weblogs in general, moneymaking using weblogs, and SixApart, the producer's of Movable Type.

NMH: --human-readable

2003-07-01T16:50:00-04:00

Apropos of nothing, except UNIX noodling, the commands df and du have a --human-readable (-h) option on most modern unices.

I can't tell you how much joy this discovery brought me. In the days of sloshing around 2.1 gigabytes just for the heck of it, trying to calculate in my head how much space a directory took up, or how much is left on a drive, was getting difficult.

Yet another of life's little victories.

Granneman: RFID Chips for Dummies

2003-07-01T12:43:00-04:00

I know squat about RFID chips. Thankfully, Scott Granneman can fill me in on the basics of RFID and the implications of its usage.

Synopsis: Way cool. Way scary. With great power comes great responsibility.

Sigler: iPhoto 2 MetaWeblog

2003-07-01T12:22:00-04:00

Eric Sigler has hacked up an iPhoto plug-in to post to any weblog tool supporting the MetaWeblog API. More grist for using weblogs as social media ecology tools. Friction to add media becomes negligible.

VMware: VMotion

2003-07-01T12:18:00-04:00

VMware is launching VMotion, technology allowing admins to "move applications from one computer to another without any interruption in service." according to Robert McMillan.

At first I was really amped about this because I parsed "application" as "virtual machine". Moving applications is pretty boring, (cf. the old UC Berkeley Sprite operating system) although depending on restrictions this at least moves the granularity of mobility up from thread like computations.

Now when we can start sloshing around running VMs on an optical network then the world will change. Think about it. We've got a decent handle on how to manage individual desktop machines. Let's just make that the unit of distributed computation and be done with it.

Shirky: RSS, Echo, Wikis, & Weblogs

2003-07-01T12:08:00-04:00

Clay Shirky's article on the Echo rhubarb, the process underlying the feuding factions, and the contrasting affordances of the collaborative technology applied, is quite good. His discussion is less about the technical flaming and more about the differences between weblogs and wikis. In short, weblogs are egocentric while wikis damp vanity.

The essay hints at a real essence of how blogs and wikis should be married. I think there's one last element that's missing though. While wikis reflect consensus, and they track changes, they don't really track major consensus points. A wiki page can be quite inactive, at which point, you really want to take a snapshot and archive it somewhere, and then the page can become active again, e.g. new consensus is arrived at.

Hmmm, this may be one reason to understand network structure in a social media ecology. If you can model and detect the lifetime of a "story", you can determine when consensus has been reached and "history should be fixed". Of course things can and will change, but it's good to have snapshots of those collective synch points.

Memo to self: do some pruning on this weblog to see if we got Shirky's name right everywhere

Jenkins: What Is the Blogosphere?

2003-07-01T11:54:00-04:00

Microdoc News is publishing a piece purporting to explain what this blog based media ecology is all about, through the words of bloggers themselves. Couldn't really find a byline, so I'm crediting Elwyn Jenkins since he has a copyright.

Kalsey & Zeller: Zempt 0.3

2003-07-01T11:44:00-04:00

Zempt looks like a nice cross platform posting tool for Movable Type. However, I'm curious as to how they get to be cross platform. If it's Java Inside (tm), I wonder if Zempt is pokey.

MBC: Museum of Broadcast Communications

2003-06-29T19:21:00-04:00

I've been involved in some interesting meetings with the Museum of Broadcast Communications so I wanted to park their link for future reference.

Globe & Mail: RSS Feeds

2003-06-29T19:03:00-04:00

If you need to get your canuck news on, The Toronto Globe and Mail has a bunch of RSS feeds.

Ceglowski: Center for Hellenic Studies

2003-06-28T00:13:00-04:00

The Center for Hellenic Studies recently hosted Macej Ceglowski, a serious Web hacker specializing in working with non-profits. Apparently, within this very cushy center for humanists, spasms of hardcore geekery break out.

Memo to self: do something cool enough to get an invitation from these folks.

Schachtman: Virtual Baseball Cards

2003-06-27T23:57:00-04:00

Baseball cards have basically turned into precious metals, according to Noah Schachtman. Now Topps will just lock them in a vault, and people can trade them online in an eBay style market.

Hunch. For this online community, a segment has devoted itself to impartially reporting on transactions, trends, and troubles. In short a free press probably emerged.

Hypothesis, any collection of media artifacts can cohere a community in which a free press will/must emerge.

Winn: TrackBack Ain't Whack

2003-06-26T18:43:00-04:00

Phillip Winn's response to Daring Fireball's TrackBack complaints pretty much sums up my thoughts. Combine this post with Grimmelmann's cultural take on TrackBack and you've got reason to get excited about TrackBack.

Memo to self: The Movable Type bookmarklet took it upon itself to ask me to ping the TrackBack URL for Grimmelmann's post. No muss, no fuss. I post and the work get's done for me.

Now I need to dig in and see how it actually discovered the TrackBack id.

Gruber: TrackBack Whack

2003-06-26T18:35:00-04:00

John Gruber, aka Daring Fireball, says Take Your TrackBacks and Dangle

Quote: One of Movable Type's most distinguishing features is something called TrackBack. I don't use it for Daring Fireball, nor do I plan to.

Gruber makes some good arguments as to why TrackBack is problematic, but his fallback to referrer logs I find uncompelling. At least TrackBack attempts to raise the level of semantic information, and as others point out, TrackBack isn't conflated with other server access goop.

TrackBack may not be the exact right thing at the moment, but it's at least an attempt at forward progress.

Memo to audience: I'm mainly blogging this as a test of the MT one click bookmarklet, which is reminding me that yes indeed, editing in a browser still sucks.

Sugimoto: CSCL Keynote Slides

2003-06-25T10:08:00-04:00

Masanori Sugimoto gave an interesting keynote talk at CSCL 2003. His work integrates ubiquitous and tangible computing into classrooms and museums. Good stuff.

Holovaty: BBC RSS Feeds

2003-06-25T00:16:00-04:00

Others have reported on this, but Adrian Holovaty has actual details on the workings of the BBC's plethora of RSS feeds.

Between the BBC, CNet, The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, and Wired News, you can put together an aggregation with gravitas. Hmmm, there's got to be sports and entertainment out there somewhere to round out this synthetic paper.

Grimmelmann: Trackback & Free Speech

2003-06-24T17:54:00-04:00

Uh oh, now the lawyers are getting in on this TrackBack stuff.

Thanks again to Anil D... oh just subscribe to Anil's Daily Links why don't ya.

Time: On Photoblogs

2003-06-24T17:48:00-04:00

Now that the editors at Time (at least online) have written about photoblogging, you can talk to your mom about them with a straight face.

Okay since photoblogs have an official cultural seal of approval, someone needs to hack meta tools to work with these blogs in the abstract. Shoot, post, tell, connect. It could happen in our lifetime.

Thanks to Anil Dash

Choate: MT PerlScript Plug-In

2003-06-24T17:38:00-04:00

Just today I was thinking, "Wouldn't it be great if someone had written an MT tag plug-in that ran plain old Perl."

Thanks to Brad Choate's PerlScript Plugin, I didn't even have to go to the LazyWeb. Muy Bueno, although I do have to note it makes my little old PIII server wheeze a bit. Use sparingly.

NMH: Googling Shirky

2003-06-23T15:16:00-04:00

Just doing a bit of ad hoc querying, I Googled across Kevin Mark's analysis of Shirky's Power Law article.

As a bonus, in the comments section, there's a a link to another weblog crawler: organica. Looks like they have a bunch of weblog data.

Someone should be downloading this data, analyzing it every day, and presenting a dynamic picture of the blogosphere's growth.

Moretel & Hubauer: PXSL, Easy XML

2003-06-23T11:31:00-04:00

Tom Moertel and Bill Hubauer have cooked up PXSL, a shorthand notation for writing XML. PXSL is particularly targeted at XML documents that are heavier on the markup than on the text data. They pull the Python trick of using indentation to indicate nesting, break markup out of the angle brackets, and then force the text data into delimiters. They also have a macro system, based upon PL design principles, baked in.

Interesting stuff, and it actually looks like a better target for higher level tools than XML itself. Of course to my eye, they're simply trending towards s-exprs.

West: More Hidden Perl Treasures

2003-06-22T10:44:00-04:00

Casey West unearths a few more underutilized gems in the core Perl modules. Interestingly, Perl has a lot of code manipulation tools built in. Macros who?

Newman: Recent Publications

2003-06-21T11:50:00-04:00

Mark Newman, a frequent Duncan Watts collaborator in social network modeling, keeps a list of recent publications. This includes what looks like a very promising literature review.

Vega-Redondo: Changing World, Social Capital

2003-06-21T11:37:00-04:00

In the continuing pursuit of modeling social media networks, I Googled across "Building Up Social Capital In a Changing World". It's a long paper, but looks pretty interesting.

ECSCW '03: Social Networks Workshop

2003-06-20T14:08:00-04:00

At the 2003 European Computer Supported Cooperative Work Conference there's an attached workshop on social networks and CSCW. The conference is in Helsinki, Finland.

I have to say, I'm stoked about the topic, but not the location. Three intercontinental trips in one year seems like pushing it. However, we must shoulder on.

Yoon: Another ArsDigita Take

2003-06-20T12:54:00-04:00

Michael Yoon was in the heart of ArsDigita at the time it imploded. Along with the horrid VCs, PhilG and Eve tagged Yoon as part of the problem. Now he's getting his side out.

Synopsis: The founders made critical mistakes too, chief of which was building a cult of personality that shielded them from essential criticism.

oddpost: Web E-Mail & Aggregation

2003-06-20T12:47:00-04:00

oddpost is a Web based e-mail client. Now they've added support for RSS aggregation and are threatening all sorts of cool extensions. (If they had a plug-in mechanism, that would be sick!).

Could be useful to introduce folks to RSS aggregation without installing something on their desktop.

iTopik: RSS Aggregator Roundup

2003-06-20T12:44:00-04:00

iTopik has a decent survey of current blogging tools, including RSS aggregators.

Winer: Weblog Access to NYTimes Archives

2003-06-20T12:41:00-04:00

Dave Winer, documents the agreement and interface available for The New York Times archives, specific to webloggers and their tools.

A bit stale, but still useful.

Memo to self: blog that stuff about TrackBack.

NMH: Wiki's Anti-Fixity?

2003-06-20T12:15:00-04:00

Just parking a thought. Wiki's are praised for their wide open nature regarding changes. For certain media, especially news, fixity (thanks John Seeley Brown) is an essential property. The newspaper doesn't change out from under folks and therefore can serve as a communal reference point, whether the actual content is right or wrong.

Lemma: Wikis and journalism are fundamentally incompatible.

Hmmm...

Cone: BloggerCon Media Panel

2003-06-20T11:58:00-04:00

Ed Cone is running a panel on blogging and the media at BloggerCon. I wasn't planning on attending, but now it seems like there really should be some sort of Medill presence there.

Memo to self: check to see if this conflicts with the ONA meeting.

NMH: Bergen Photos

2003-06-20T09:59:00-04:00

Parking links to photo galleries of Ben Shapiro's trip to Bergen, Norway, for CSCL 2003. Your's truly was along for the ride and makes a few guest appearances.

Memo to audience: trips to fjords highly recommended!

Little: Bluetooth Maturing

2003-06-20T09:22:00-04:00

Bluetooth seems to be stabilizing according to Martin Little of Mobitopia. While I was a big Bluetooth doubter about a year ago, I'm starting to come around.

First, the analogy that Bluetooth is a "wireless serial connection" vs Wi-Fi's "wireless Ethernet", brought home what the technology is good for. Also, it's short range which means it can be used for proximity applications. At the same time, Bluetooth is directionless, eliminating IRDA's major weakness. Finally, Little's article hints that the last hurdle to widespread acceptance is starting to be addressed: it's too damned hard to program for Bluetooth!!

Bray: RSS, Promise, Peril

2003-06-20T09:11:00-04:00

Tim Bray (one of the XML inventors), riffs on the business potential of RSS. In essence, RSS holds promise of becoming the defacto event notification format for business information. Win-win all around.

The peril is the rather confused, unprofessional state of RSS "standardization". The entire sordid mess has been well documented elsewhere, but he's partially right. RSS direction is fragmented. However, at this point I don't I'm not actually sure it's work freezing in a standardization process. The only thing RSS has really been used for is weblog change information. More field experience may be required, for these new applications.

Willison: Searching Links

2003-06-20T00:06:00-04:00

I'm parking a few links from Simon Willison regarding search, since I have to run a class session next week on the topic:

Koehntopp: Trea 600 Recap

2003-06-19T23:50:00-04:00

Over at Mobitopia, Frank Koehntopp recaps the announcement of Handspring's next Treo. I'd have to get my hands on one to make a firm judgment, but it looks like a tempting XMas gift.

Unsanity: WindowShade X

2003-06-19T23:07:00-04:00

Memo to self: must install much better window management tools on the PowerBook.

Park: Inside Laszlo

2003-06-19T22:52:00-04:00

Don Park gives a peek inside Laszlo, Java based toolbox for generating SWF dynamically in J2EE applications.

The big inhale (thanks for the term wgg) of Java packages is downright scary, but maybe there's an underlying toolkit for spitting out Flash worth looking at.

Technorati: Developer's Page

2003-06-19T21:50:00-04:00

Back in the saddle from Norway and man is intercontinental travel a bitch.

Technorati now has a developer's site on its way to building a dev community.

Choudhury: Complex Networks Readings

2003-06-17T08:29:00-04:00

Trawling the Web for information regarding games on graph structures, I Googled across the Complex Networks Reading Group at The Media Lab. Looks like Tanzeem Choudhury helped put the group and readings together.

NMH: @CSCL 2003

2003-06-17T03:11:00-04:00

Currently, I'm at the International Conference on Computer Supported Collaborative Learning. I've had net access, but between travel, final grading for spring 2003, and submitting a paper there wasn't time for posting. Now that my soul is catching up (cf Gibson's Pattern Recognition), all 2.5 of my readers should see some more activity around here.

On a side note, Bergen, Norway is very beautiful, but is 7 hours ahead of Chicago, and features midnight sun. Try getting over jet lag, when it's only twilight at 1:00 AM.

Pilgrim: Safe RSS Consumption

2003-06-12T11:25:00-04:00

Mark Pilgrim documents

issues with naive presentation of HTML embedded within RSS feeds. As is Pilgrim's usual modus operandi, he also explains how to deal with the situation.

MT: Bookmarklets & Selected Text

2003-06-11T14:27:00-04:00

Speaking of MT bookmarklets, I just discovered that they automatically grab selected text. Learn something new every day. This could form the basis of a convenient pull quote/annotation authoring system. If only editing in a browser didn't really suck.

As an example, I've grabbed some text on Cambridge housing prices from Amanda Paulson at the Christian Science Monitor

In the cramped Grolier Poetry Bookshop, where shelves of Latin American poets spill into Brits and Scandinavians, owner Louisa Solano mourns the old Cambridge, ... "Now Cambridge lacks color."

Hah! The Boston Metro area always did lack color, if you know what I mean.

Memo to audience: I went to college in Cambridge. Better dead than Crimson.

Memo to self: need to find a nice styled quote tag

iBoost: Dreamweaver Tutorial

2003-06-11T13:59:00-04:00

iBoost has a nice, basic Dreamweaver tutorial Dreamweaver Tutorial.

Frankly I'm just parking this link as I test out the Movable Type posting bookmarklet.

Apnel: Weblog Conference

2003-06-10T07:23:00-04:00

Timothy Apnel has notes up from the ClickZ weblog conference. Denise Howell is also doing a great job of transcribing the sessions, I just haven't trawled through them to pick the best of the bunch.

Pavlina: Amateur vs Pro

2003-06-10T07:18:00-04:00

Directed at shareware publishers, Steve Pavlina has good advice for all folks trying to become more professional.

Kahney: Fotolog Brouhaha

2003-06-09T09:42:00-04:00

Leander Kahney documents the Fotolog.net controversy in an article for Wired News. Synopsis, popular photo blogging site goes from free to paid, culture clash breaks out.

Takeaways:

There's not one but two culture clashes going on. US vs Brazil and Pro vs amateur photogs
Linking and commenting are key parts of growing the community
Group forming is a popular activity
After a while, the persistent users start to find new uses for their cameras
There are two highly visible measures of performance, posting frequency and popularity, on the front page. People perform to measures

I wonder if Fotolog.net came to the table with any pre-existing content? In any event, this is an interesting case study in rapid community formation.

Hadley: moblogging.org

2003-06-07T11:50:00-04:00

Jon Hadley has launched moblogging.org to cover mobile blogging technology. While reasonably understated, I think he sells the trend short a little bit. Moblogging might be the first step in blowing up the destkop and turning the personal computer into personal computing.

Wolff: TiVo for Blogs

2003-06-06T23:43:00-04:00

Phil Wolff comes up with a great tagline: "RSS newsreaders are TiVo for blogs."

Now if someone could get around to doing TiVo for Web news.

NMH: PhotoMesaLog

2003-06-06T12:22:00-04:00

This is too obvious not have been tried as of yet, but I'm parking the idea for the heck of it.

Wouldn't a combination of Fotolog.net and PhotoMesa be the bees knees?

Ghiglione: On NY Times Resignations

2003-06-05T22:33:00-04:00

Apropos of nothing, it's an odd feeling when you run across your dean in your RSS aggregator.

InternetArchive: Moving Images

2003-06-05T11:57:00-04:00

Brewster Kahle's Internet Archive organization has a freely accessible moving images archive.

Why do I care? Because a historian I'm working with, while a great guy, seems a bit touchy about copyright on the materials we're going to use. (related to 1909 Plan of Chicago). Heck we're not even sure what the rights will be for the stuff.

One of my theories is that software can help build, organize, and direct an open inquiry community. Of course a reasonable body of interesting content is needed. I think the Prelinger Archives might qualify. And no permission required to work with it!

Adamson: Re-Introducing QtJ

2003-06-05T11:44:00-04:00

Chris Adamson, previously blogged in this space regarding parsing the QuickTime file format, has popped up again in O'Reilly's OnJava.com. Now Adamson is taking apart the QuickTime for Java library. His first article contains an interesting discussion of SMIL usage as well.

Anderson: arsDigita History

2003-06-04T12:44:00-04:00

Apropos of nothing, I ran across an insider history of arsDigita by Eve Anderson. philg is a hero of mine, having been one of the first to codify the essential points of database backed websites. It's a shame that his company went down the crapper like it did.

Thanks to Joel Spolsky

Haystack: Shipped

2003-06-03T09:33:00-04:00

Looks like MIT's Haystack project finally shipped something people can kick the tires on. Given the titles of their papers, it could be called a PIM for the Semantic Web. RDF inside.

Smith, et. al.: Yalta: PKI & Tuplespaces

2003-06-03T09:01:00-04:00

I'm parking this link on Yalta, a system that combines dynamic public key infrastructure with tuplespaces until I get a chance to read it closer.

Gaffen: Wi-Fi Industry RSS Feeds

2003-06-02T21:21:00-04:00

Adam Gaffen (sp?) at Network World alerts folks to the fact that the publication has RSS feeds for overall Wi-Fi news, wireless security, and wireless LAN switches.

Thanks to Glennf at Wi-Fi Networking News.

Like I need anymore RSS feeds.

Thompson: Social Software Bah Humbug

2003-06-02T15:19:00-04:00

Over at the BBC, Bill Thompson attempts to burst the "social software" bubble before it even expands. Thompson is spot on with his criticism, especially the point about ignoring previous HCI, psychology, and computer mediated communication research. I would also add all of the effort by the CSCW community.

He paints with a little too broad a brush, leaving out such folks as the Social Dynamics Lab at HP, who really do solid principled work. But maybe that's his point. Those talking a lot about social software aren't doing much and don't fundamentally know what they're talking about. However, there are folks out there getting stuff done and investigating the frontier. They're just not overselling the short term gains and self-promoting their ass off.

Lutz: New York Maps

2003-06-02T13:28:00-04:00

Nancy Lutz is previewing an archive of historical NYC maps. They're meant as a means to see what you buy before shipping off funds to her in exchange for a map copy. Not sure it's really smart to be putting these up, but the wheels are churning again in my head.

Get map gifs. Enter into a photowiki type system. Open to NYC public. Let folks tell their stories. See what happens.

Pick city. Repeat.

Get rich!!

It could happen in our lifetime!

Park: Micro-Wiki

2003-06-01T19:12:00-04:00

Don Park gives name to the concept I'm implementing for posts in NusRooms, each post/item becomes it's own Micro-Wiki. Both people and automated services can annotate the Micro-Wiki and many concepts such as TrackBack, comments, recommendations, fold in uniformly.

McKnight: button archive

2003-06-01T10:31:00-04:00

Apropos of nothing, here's a bunch of icon buttons I was digging around for.

Even worse is the fact that I already posted about this, with almost exactly the same text!! Right down to the "Apropos of nothing...".

I tried to find the link first on this here blog but failed miserably. Honest!

Krages: Photographer's Rights

2003-05-31T16:40:00-04:00

Bert Krages, registered attorney, has put together a pocket flyer regarding photographer's rights. I've been wondering what the extent and limits of public photography are. With the proliferation of digital cameras knowing these rights is increasingly important, especially with folks posting them onto the Web.

Thanks to Flutterby for the tip.

NMH: Community This Week In...

2003-05-31T00:02:00-04:00

I'm starting to get obsessed with combining the nostalgic and archival features of news organizations. Previously I commented on Time magazine making a cover archive available. Screw the cover archive, just do a weekly "This Week In...". Pick a year, post some content, and ask users to write up their memories. Select the best. Promote to the front page (website or Tempo section).

How to get rich? Free for users, charge exorbitantly for sponsorships. This also covers your prizes too.

West: Perl Core Nuggets

2003-05-30T23:51:00-04:00

Casey West catalogs some really useful modules in the Perl core. High on my list of new discoveries is are the Env, File::Temp, and Shell modules. Kewl beens!

memigo: Customized Web News

2003-05-30T23:20:00-04:00

The about page for memigo talks about customized, news, peer communities, and implicit/explicit rating. MovableBLOG seems to think memigo uses RSS to watch what you link to and TrackBack to ship stuff back into your weblog. Of course I could just follow the link to where memigo documents this interaction, but that would be too easy. Interesting idea, although once again, linking is the only gesture that can be observed by the service.

Guess I should sign up and see what it's all about.

Yee: Serious MMORPG Research

2003-05-30T22:54:00-04:00

The Corante Social Software blog directed me to Nick Yee's homepage and weblog. Haven't had time to dig in yet, but looking at some of the link titles, Yee executes seriously rigorous investigation into Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games.

I'm still keeping warm the idea of documenting emergent free press like institutions in MMORPG games. Maybe Yee has some grist for the mill.

Glennf: Dirt Cheap Wi-Fi

2003-05-29T11:49:00-04:00

The cost of Wi-Fi chips is falling through the floor, according to Glenn Fleishman of Wi-Fi Networking News. Given the floor prices of WAPs he's talking about, you could start talking about Redundant Meshes of Inexspensive WAPs.

But that doesn't make a good acronym.

Benson: All Consuming Web Services

2003-05-28T23:11:00-04:00

At xml.com, Erik Benson digs into All Consuming, an ad hoc web service wired together out of the Google, Amazon, weblogs.com, and blo.gs web service APIs. All Consuming trawls weblogs for book references, comes up with a top 10 mentioned books, and grabs further information from Amazon. This also includes Amazons recommendations.

Key nugget: these services require low to no permission to utilize, so developers can scratch their itch as need be.

Sippey: TrackBack Big Picture

2003-05-28T13:49:00-04:00

Through CNet's Big Picture feature, Michael Sippey has a minor epiphany regarding the usage of TrackBack. In the process, he explains way better than I can, how TrackBack can be used to display the social life of a news item.

Carnell: Abyss Web Server

2003-05-28T11:51:00-04:00

Brian Carnell was knocking about installing MovableType on a laptop, and mentioned the Abyss Web Server. Looks nice and lightweight and could someday be used to create a fully standalone NusRoom install.

Apache's really cool, but the only significant lock in feature is mod_perl. Maybe mod_rewrite too.

Coates: Blog Citation & Discussion

2003-05-27T20:48:00-04:00

Tom Coates continues serious thinking regarding how blog networks, discussion, and information interact. I'm still skeptical about blogs as discussion vehicles, but he's starting to make a much more principled case.

Bellard: TCC

2003-05-26T11:03:00-04:00

Fabrice Bellard has cooked up TCC, the Tiny C Compiler. It's so small you can use it as an embedded C compiler within an application. Meaning that now you could use C as a "scripting" language, although I would never call it one.

I wonder if TCC's embedding interface is better than Perl's. Hard to believe it could be any worse.

Thanks to Patrick Logan.

Sleepycat: Berkeley DB XML

2003-05-26T10:39:00-04:00

How did I miss Sleepycat's new Berkeley DB XML which is looking to be a really good XML database? Something I've been looking for for a long time.

John Merrells, a Berkeley DB XML developer (the prime one?) is keeping a related weblog.

Hayes: Graph Theory in Practice

2003-05-24T15:19:00-04:00

Brian Hayes, of American Scientist magazine, has a nice overview of small world graphs in two parts. If you don't have time to read "Linked", "Small Worlds", or "Six Degrees", these article's will do in a pinch.

Elin: Fotowiki

2003-05-24T09:35:00-04:00

Brilliant idea by Greg Elkin. Annotate areas on photos using a Wiki like Web interface, indicate annotations visually right on the photo.

In my course last quarter, some students developed Web based annotation of historical JPEG images. They didn't go the last 2 miles by making it Wiki like and showing the annotations on the image.

Here's a next step for Fotowikis. Use Flash to display the images + annotations, and then employ Magic Lenses and Photoshop style layers to deal with plethoras (is that a word?) of annotations.

Graham: Reloaded Reviewed

2003-05-23T23:42:00-04:00

Philip Graham writes the review that Jason Levine wanted to write...

And me too. I couldn't have said it better.

Tomkins, et. al.: Blogspace Evolution

2003-05-23T23:32:00-04:00

Small world moment. Andrew Tomkins and I lived in the same dorm at M.I.T. A very nice guy, he was one of the major foosball comptetitors me and my buddy The Fongmaster played against.

Oh yeah, and even though he's not first author, this WWW 2003 paper on how blog communities evolve that lists him looks pretty damn cool.

Memo to self: get a copy of this paper.

Nisselson: Up With Phone Cameras

2003-05-23T23:27:00-04:00

Evan Nisselson explains, to professional photographers, why digital phone cameras are a really big deal.

Executive summary: it's the ubiquity stupid!

Ceglowski: Seeking Weblogs

2003-05-23T23:23:00-04:00

Maciej Ceglowski, of Idle Words, is doing yeoman's work building a world wide list of weblogs.

Noring: Open eBook Standard

2003-05-23T23:17:00-04:00

John Noring explains the requirements demanded of an eBook standard and how the existing Open EBook Publication Structure meets those demands. Also, he makes a case for proprietary standards not fitting the bill.

It's a pretty long article (disclosure: I haven't finished it), but well documented and explained.

Given what I now know of PDF, QuickTime, Flash, SMIL, et. al. if OEBPS is the real deal it would also make a nice format for news publishers.

Kalbach & Boesnick: Rail Side Doesn't Matter

2003-05-21T12:45:00-04:00

Apparently, where your navigation rail appears on your web page, left or right side, doesn't make much of a difference.

Memo to self: check out the Journal of Digital Information.

Jenkins: Blogosphere Story Dynamics

2003-05-21T12:30:00-04:00

Elwyn Jenkins, propietor of Microdoc News, attempts to analyze the lifecycle of a story in the blogosphere. There's some interesting thinking here, including the notion that a story is really a network of commentary and the classification of the commenters.

However, no source data or methodology is provided, so it's unclear how scientific the result is. A thin veneer of legitimacy is given by a few real numbers, but I would be leary of accepting the conclusions as fact.

Einstein: Digitized Papers Archive

2003-05-20T10:36:00-04:00

Albert Einstein's personal writings have been digitized and put online. I wonder how a community of scholars will form around that content.

Thanks to Mary Hodder at bIPlog.

Logan: Tuple Space Reasoning

2003-05-20T10:27:00-04:00

Patrick Logan links to a paper on view centric reasoning about tuple spaces that might be useful for programming PlaySpace, a tuple space framework that a colleague of mine is cooking up.

Granovetter: SiVNAP

2003-05-19T22:23:00-04:00

Mark Granovetter of "weak ties" fame now chairs the Stanford Sociology Department, and is running a project to map the Silicon Valley social network of insiders.

Maybe it's a good sign that the project website carries the odor of 1995 web design, meaning they may actually be getting work done, but at least they have an interesting collection of social network analysis software links.

Higgins & Tannam: BitTorrent for Dummies

2003-05-18T20:29:00-04:00

I don't know jack about BitTorrent, but I've got a gut that P2P distribution of large media files will make a post-Napster comeback.

Thankfully, a duo over at MP3newswire.net have written up a tutorial for me. Even better is the link to 1/2 a gigabytes worth of MP3s on a keychain. Kewl!

Chromatic: PL Hating

2003-05-18T20:24:00-04:00

In an OnLamp article, chromatic waxes on why he hates various programming languages. A provocative title but it's backed up with some good criticisms of various languages including our favorite scripting languages, Perl, Python, PhP, etc. All in all a good discussion of how to think of programming language designs.

Miramax: Shaolin Soccer

2003-05-18T17:02:00-04:00

Apropos of nothing, what do you get when you mix Hong Kong Kung Fu, Matrix Effects, Futbol, and The Bad News Bears?

Check out the trailer for Shaolin Soccer to find out.

Coates: Blogosphere Information Seeking

2003-05-18T16:56:00-04:00

Tom Coates riffs on how full insight can be achieved in the blogosphere. The gist is that you don't need to read everything to be fully informed.

Unfortunately, Coates correlates linking with the "insightfulness" of commentary. Also, order and context of item arrival are ignored in terms of gaining insight. In short, when you come into the story, what order you receive followup information, and also what else is competing for your attention are all important elements.

However I think it's a nice initial stab at thinking about information distribution and "journalism" within small world graphs.

Observation: there don't seem to be any good models of what it means to be "fully informed" on a particular topic.

Lessig: Pitch In Folks

2003-05-17T17:12:00-04:00

Lawrence Lessig thought he had a congress critter lined up to introduce some basic legislation to free lots of abandoned material that should really be in the public domain. The stuff is being held hostage to potential litigation.

Said congressperson is getting heat from the copyright cartel's lobbyists and is starting to wilt. Support is needed from other congress critters and you, yes you, can help out by prodding your rep, even if you didn't vote for 'em. Lessig tells you how to pitch in.

HP IDL: Information Flow in Social Groups

2003-05-17T16:58:00-04:00

HP's Information Dynamics Lab is at it again. They've released a short paper entitled "Information Flow in Social Groups", discussing an epidemic model of information distribution in social networks. Looks like they include some empirical observations from HP e-mail flows.

Thompson: The Blogeoisie Suck

2003-05-17T16:53:00-04:00

The inevitable backlash against weblogs is picking up steam. Bill Thompson fires on the blogging a-list, and coins a new term blogeoisie. If nothing else he'll live on for launching that new term.

Siffert: Blogging Conversation Sucks

2003-05-17T16:50:00-04:00

Curt Siffert has a identified a few reasons why blogging as a discussion tool is pretty poor. Over at iWire, steiny piles on but focuses on how good ideas can get lost in the blogosphere.

All good points, and I'll also add that blogs don't centralize discussion. This means that keeping up on all the elements of the discussion is well nigh impossible.

In the physical world, this sort of discussion does occur between cultural magazines and reviews, literary journals, and scientific publications. However, the number of venues is smaller and the rate of discussion is slower. Thus humans can manage, but barely at that.

Lexar Media: JumpDrive Trio

2003-05-16T17:30:00-04:00

Lexar Media's JumpDrive Trio is marketed as a portable SD Memory Card to USB reader. I see it as a convenient form factor for carrying an SD Memory Card in a pocket and then slapping the SD card in an ad hoc device. Such a device could be a PDA, tablet pc, etc. The key is that you don't own it before you show up, but thanks to the easily portable memory in the SD card, you can sign such a device out, and turn it into yours for a short period of time.

Bonus, you can easily attach the storage to any USB enabled device, read any desktop PC.

I'm thinking this is a great mechanism to get handhelds into a hospital, where you really would rather people didn't flat out own a particular PDA due to the potential for breakage. Also, if you feel like upgrading the devices, just ditch them, as long as you keep the key data in personal SD card.

MT & Gallery: Two Great Tastes

2003-05-15T17:28:00-04:00

Gallery is a topnotch php based photogallery package. Looks like Gallery is easy to integrate with Movable Type, which would come in handy for this summer's New Media capstone class.

Ozzie: Social Software Good

2003-05-15T09:27:00-04:00

Ray Ozzie is optimistic about "social software" (blech), and even gets back to the groupware and CSCW roots. One differentiator though is that the new breed targets population sizes between tightly knit groups and mass audiences. One of my current refrains is that software is okay at sensing small groups, decent at mass audiences, and terrible at communities/societies. That's the sweet spot for social software.

Graham: Hackers and Painters

2003-05-15T09:23:00-04:00

Prediction, Paul Graham will put together his sequence of essays on computing and programming, including the brilliant recent release "Hackers and Painters", into an accessible book.

Which would be great, because then I could hand it out to undergrads, along with some Norvig, so students would know what they're getting into.

NMH: Matrix Reloaded

2003-05-15T09:19:00-04:00

There were actually a fair number of interesting things to post about yesterday, but NMH got overtaken by events: lecture, a guest class appearance, a research group meeting, oh and Matrix Reloaded.

Verdict: need Matrix Reloaded Remixed

Others have commented on various cinematic flaws, but for me the worst part was the godawful soundtrack.

Chijiiwa: Blogmatcher

2003-05-13T21:41:00-04:00

Blogwatcher looks like the kernel of a decent idea. Instead of correlating links, I'd do content analysis on the link destinations. Some sort of clustering or vector space analysis.

Anyhoo, another potential service to toss in the NusRoom.

coleoptera: NMH narcisism

2003-05-13T21:12:00-04:00

I have absolutely no idea why anyone would put my measly site in their blogroll, but Technorati reports someone did.

At least I'm in good company, but embarrassed to point out yet another Northwestern weblog right under my own nose.

Memo to audience: well at least I know one nugget of knowledge from my classes stuck!

ECSCW '03: Workshop on Social Networks

2003-05-13T21:00:00-04:00

This workshop is right in the wheelhouse for my work on NusRoom.

Griffin Mobile: Total Remote

2003-05-13T20:55:00-04:00

I've been fantasizing recently about a "Magic Wand" computing device. The thing would be as small as a laser pointer and have little to no UI. The wand could detect nearby presentation resources, have a tiny (audio/light) indicator of availability, and could send a few simple messages to these devices. Using the directed connectivity (IR) a user could easily specify gestures for specific devices. Combine with Wi-Fi, TCP/IP, a little local storage, some computing and you've got a device that a person can do "ad hoc" interactions with.

A Pocket PC device with a Total Remote attached might fit the bill. Not quite as small as a laser pointer, but good enough for a proof of concept. The Magic Wand eventually should be a fixed function device, but for prototyping a general purpose computer is good.

Or maybe I should just look at the X10 stuff. But the key bit is that I *really* want good old TCP/IP and the new overlay multicast that's really going to change the Internet. And I expect the presentation resources to actually be a bit smarter than your typical X10 device.

Memo to self: they're only 30 bucks, buy one already!!

Pilgrim: PyTechnorati

2003-05-12T22:22:00-04:00

Mark Pilgrim, taking time out from his busy schedule, has written a Python module to wrap the Technorati API.

Now if I could only figure out what the damn API is actually good for.

Park: Social Software Qualms

2003-05-11T21:18:00-04:00

Don Park has some misgivings regarding social software, running along the lines of some objections I get regarding NusRoom. Essentially, even though folks could be more informed, people can and still might narrowcast themselves into a stupor.

Ultimately, the only idiotproof system is one only idiots would use, but I think such systems can have feedback mechanisms that encourage positive usage.

Orlowski: Weblog Specific Google

2003-05-09T20:25:00-04:00

Andrew Orlowski, of The Register, reports on Google's announcement to make a weblog specific element to the search engine. Of course, as a noted weblog doubter, Orlowski also takes the opportunity to claim weblogs are highly overvalued by Google.

Can't say as how I agree with the "low information quality of blog infested Google results," quote, but I can see how automatically generated links (e.g. TrackBack), could skew relevance results.

Thinking out loud: folks say Google crawls weblogs more frequently, but is that because they're weblogs? Or because they change fast? I think the latter.

Tufte: PowerPoint Considered Harmful

2003-05-09T14:02:00-04:00

I've been using a minimalist PowerPoint template (Blends) and trying to avoid bullet text at all cost. Now noted quantitative visual information display expert Edward Tufte is going to bring the hammer to PowerPoint in an upcoming book.

Now watch, he'll really slam Blends.

Thanks to More Like This

CAIDA: Walrus Graph Visualization

2003-05-08T16:22:00-04:00

And thanks to Maciej, I stumbled across another tool for graph visualization, Walrus, from the fine folks at CAIDA.

Ceglowski: Blog Crawling

2003-05-08T16:20:00-04:00

Maciej Ceglowski is putting together yet another blog crawler.

Foley: MS Targeting Blogging

2003-05-08T16:17:00-04:00

According to Mary Jo Foley and Microsoft Watch, Big Green is starting to key in on blogging. I'm not sure what's scarier. That Microsoft if moving into the blogosphere, or that there's a magazine devoted to "watching" one software company.

Grumet: Weblog Deep Thinking

2003-05-08T16:15:00-04:00

The only really deep thinking about weblogs in Andrew Grumet's essay is the notion of using weblogs as passports/universal identifiers. Intriguing, but he essentially relies on DNS entries to represent user identity.

Otherwise, the piece is a quite good overview of the state of weblogs in 2003.

Callahan: EInk's Smart Paper

2003-05-07T22:04:00-04:00

EInk is moving the world one step closer to blowing up the desktop. Rick Callahan of AP reports on the company's advances in thin, flexible displays. Not a whole lot of detail, but it looks like the technology is past the feasibility test and onto figuring out how to manufacture the things efficiently. Looks like more details to come in Nature.

North: graphviz

2003-05-06T23:32:00-04:00

For my intro programming class I've assigned them the task of generating Kevin Bacon, small world graphs. Of course it would be nice to visualize these graphs.

Conveniently enough, Stephen North and crew have developed graphviz, a layout and presentation tool for graphs.

Sreenivasan: MyHerald.com

2003-05-06T22:46:00-04:00

Over at Poynter, Sree Sreenivasan brings word of MyHerald.com, a personalized newspaper deployed by the Miami Herald. The new twist beyond typical MyYahoo stuff is a connection to a PDF style replica of the print version.

Can't say as I'm too impressed. Then again, I'm a competitor.

Tip of the mouse to: JD Lasica

Park: Chunking News

2003-05-05T22:23:00-04:00

Don Park has a good idea that could be incorporated into the NusRoom. The aggregator could automagically construct special topic "insets" that are delivered less frequently, but have a bigger chunk size, fitting attention spans and scanning ability better. Via decafbad

Groenevelt: Generating Scale Free Networks

2003-05-04T00:14:00-04:00

Digging around for a task to use as part of an assignment for my course, I googled across this collection of papers regarding the construction of scale free networks.

I wonder if anybody's trademarked the phrase, "googled across"?

PlanetPDF: PDF On The Fly

2003-05-02T16:48:00-04:00

In the course of exploring dynamic PDF generation, I ran across a good backgrounder entitled "PDF on the Fly: Tools and Strategies for Automatic Generation of PDF Files" on PlanetPDF.

JMR: Asahi Shimbun's Wireless News

2003-04-30T23:56:00-04:00

Jane Ellen Stevens, who I've bumped into on a few occasions, documents Asahi Shimbun's highly successful mobile news features. Key attractors: sports and entertainment.

Brandt: Fixing Blogranking

2003-04-29T00:21:00-04:00

While I don't particularly agree with Daniel Brandt's take on how to correct the impact of blogrolls on Google, he does document some poor interactions between the two.

InfoWorld: RSS Feeds

2003-04-29T00:14:00-04:00

InfoWorld has provided a succinct backgrounder on RSS to go along with pointers to their RSS feeds.

Diamond: Failures in Societies

2003-04-29T00:09:00-04:00

Jared Diamond, of Guns, Germs and Steel fame, has written an essay for The Edge Society cataloging how societies fail to solve problems. My surface read is that this essay isn't particularly insightful. The essay mostly consists of anecdotes and I can't discern any real predictive power from it's findings. His major point is that, in spite of four distinctive ways in which societies fail, they've still managed to make quite a bit of progress.

And...?

Schemix: Linux Kernel Hacking by Scheme

2003-04-28T23:58:00-04:00

I have no idea how robust or convenient it is, but putting Scheme in the Linux kernel sounds cool to me.

Sherwood: Chandler Details

2003-04-28T23:47:00-04:00

Chandler is a major Open Source project to be the next generation e-mail/IM application/platform. The project is being run by some pretty major software stalwarts such as Andy Hertzfeld, Mitch Kapor, and Rys McCusker. Kaitlin Sherwood transcribed her notes from a Chandler session at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference.

On the surface this should be amazingly attractive to me, but I find myself somewhat skeptical. Chandler is buzzword/open source compliant using RDF, Python, Jabber, BEEP, P2P etc. The development team seems really sharp. A very noble endeavor indeed.

But my source of skepticism is twofold. Attacking the e-mail space seems equivalent to directly attacking the Maginot line. Lots of deeply embedded and entrenched competitors, many of whom are quite good. Also, the goals of Chandler seem to have it destined to be jack of all trades, master of none. For example, building on a cross-platform GUI toolkit guarantees it'll be okay on all platforms, but not excellent on any of them, (c.f. Mozilla). If the user experience really matters, cross-platform toolkits ain't the way to go.

Good luck and godspeed guys. Ignore my stop energy.

Weise: Free Unix Haters Handbook

2003-04-28T23:36:00-04:00

The editors of The UNIX Hater's Handbook have recovered the copyright to the singularly best book on UNIX ever, and are now making the book available as a free download.

Memo to audience: no smilies for the humor impaired

Lessig: Live @ Northwestern

2003-04-24T18:15:00-04:00

At the moment, I'm parked in the McCormick Tribune Center listening to Lawrence Lessig speak, courtesy of the Evanston based non-profit Clio Society. Previously I heard him lecture at the World Wide Web conference, where the presentation was simply head down spoken word. In an interesting demonstration of the principles he's discussing there is now a heavy multimedia component, including appearances by Steamboat Willie, George W. Bush, Tony Blair, Lionel Ritchie, Batman, Aristotle, among others.

Fair use or copyright violation?

Ubiquitous Wi-Fi in Our Lifetime

And where can I get the slides

Kennington: Discrete Simulation Software

2003-04-23T22:51:00-04:00

A collection of links for software that implements discrete event simulation, gathered by Alan Kennington. I'm starting to perceive NetLogo as not quite viable for the types of systems I'm looking to simulate.

McKnight: Button Gallery

2003-04-23T22:28:00-04:00

Apropos of nothing, Taylor McKnight has gathered a collection of whizzy buttons for the repurposing.

SixApart: TypePad

2003-04-23T22:19:00-04:00

SixApart launches a MovableType hosting service, called TypePad. Blogosphere echoes.

FirstMonday: Peer-Review on the Net

2003-04-22T23:30:00-04:00

Am I clueless, or is the amazingly broad First Monday journal completely invisible to the Weblog community?

Probably just my own myopia, but these longer pieces are probably too time consuming for the average blogger to finish.

SFGate: Morning Fix

2003-04-22T23:25:00-04:00

Allegedly, SFGate's Morning Fix newsletter is quite the bee's knees.

Fagan: What's Happening

2003-04-22T23:23:00-04:00

Michael Fagan has put together a compendium of sites that collect breaking news in the Web and blogosphere. It's part of his FaganFinder

SSA: Social Software Alliance

2003-04-22T23:21:00-04:00

Not quite sure what to make about the Social Software Alliance or Social Software in general other than to guess that it won't be as serious as Static Single Assignment.

That's a joke son.

PARC: Legendary Tech Reports

2003-04-22T23:14:00-04:00

I don't have nearly enough time to look at all of these *really* old tech reports, but just scanning the author names reveals once again Xerox PARC's amazing impact on computing. Gifford, Guttag, Zellweger, Geschke, Card, Norman, Boyer & Moore's string matching paper, Bobrow, Warnock, Kay, Demers, etc. etc.

Need I say more.

Memo to self: don't know how long this archive will stick around, but it might be worth a crawl

Lillington: Meeting Gibson

2003-04-22T23:06:00-04:00

Apropos of nothing, other than really good writing, Karlan Lillington blogs of her encounter with William Gibson.

Memo to audience: Pattern Recognition is pretty good.

MS: Media Player Bloggin Plug-in

2003-04-22T23:03:00-04:00

Not all that exciting, but Microsoft is cooking up a plug-in for Windows Media Player to grab info about the currently playing track and deliver it elsewhere.

When this stuff first surfaced, I thought MS was putting a blog writing tool in WMP. Now that would have been cool.

SirPsycho: Aggregator in Mozilla

2003-04-22T22:59:00-04:00

Way out of left field is an RSS aggregator implemented completely in Mozilla's XUL interface language. Not sure whether to be amazed or repulsed.

Doesn't seem to support navigation very well in my opinion.

Divmod: Python Text Indexing

2003-04-22T22:53:00-04:00

Continuing in our Python mode, Divmod has brought us Lupy and Pyndex, two systems for text indexing with the popular scripting language that starts with a P and names a snake. Might be useful in the NusRoom.

Biondi: Scapy, Python Net Hacking

2003-04-22T22:48:00-04:00

Phillipe Biondi has put together Scapy, a serious network hacking tool tightly integrated with Python. Think tcpdump, netcat, et. al. nicely embedded, with persistence, in Python.

Mnookin: New Columbia Journalism Dean

2003-04-21T21:41:00-04:00

Of course the payback for all of this philandering is that I missed some major events, like the Columbia School of Journalism naming a new dean. While I was keeping up my blog reading, apparently this wasn't a big enough happening for bloggers (at least until today).

Thankfully, Seth Mnookin of MSNBC snagged an interview with the incoming head honcho.

Kottke: Weblogs and Power Laws

2003-04-21T20:53:00-04:00

I'm back after a trip to the University of Colorado, Computer Science Department, hosted by the amazingly gracious Skip Ellis. Between giving a talk, meeting with various faculty, and carousing in exciting Boulder (Dushanbe Tea House, very nice) I decided not to make any time for weblogging whatsoever.

That being said, I managed to read most of Duncan Watt's "Small Worlds". I'm now more convinced than ever that weblog power laws (see Shirky and Kottke) really don't mean squat, and that the underlying network structure is the big deal.

Curiously, I haven't run into anybody mentioning Ron Burt, of the University of Chicago. He'd surely tell you that the power isn't in the center, it's in the holes.

Besides, if you take a look at the data that originated this meme, there's a lot to be desired.

Prescod: XML is not S-Expressions

2003-04-15T23:29:00-04:00

As an inveterate Lisper, Paul Prescod's claim rings heretical. However, I must admit I find his argument somewhat convincing.

JSB: New Media Conference Slides

2003-04-14T21:58:00-04:00

John Seeley Brown gave the keynote speech at the USC-Berkeley New Media Conference about 3 weeks ago. Upon request, he graciously sent me a copy of the slides he prepared. I say prepared because he didn't get to present them all.

During the talk I took some haphazard notes. I'm posting them here mostly for myself, but on the off chance that someone else might find a use for them. I may also revise them at some point.

Kerton: Collages Through Fireworks

2003-04-13T11:55:00-04:00

At Sitepoint, Daniel Kerton demonstrates how to make spiffy image collages using Macromedia Fireworks.

Tipped off by Simon Willison.

Computerworld: Only 3 Years of Wi-Fi?

2003-04-12T22:07:00-04:00

According to Computerworld, there's only been 3 years of Wi-Fi, so look out for growing pains ahead. Key issues: standardization of higher speed protocols, coordination on backend services, and deployment of hotspots.

Screw that though, what the heck were those Lucent Orinoco cards I was using then?

Meerholz: Painted LEDs

2003-04-12T21:59:00-04:00

Kimberly Patch, of Technology Research News, reports on a breakthrough in manufacturing organic LEDs by Klaus Meerholz of Munich University. Bottom line, better, cheaper, higher resolution, lower power displays within 2 years.

elvin: xtrae4

2003-04-12T21:55:00-04:00

Some enterprising folks with the Elvin project, a wide area publish/subscribe toolkit, have created a Macromedia Xtra to interface with Elvin. Wonder how portable it might be to Flash?

artima.com: For Serious Programmers

2003-04-12T21:50:00-04:00

I've seen artima.com before, but William Grosso highlighted the fact that the site is providing a lot more value. They even have some pretty serious webloggers.

McKinsey: Broadband On the Rise

2003-04-12T21:44:00-04:00

Funneled through CNet, McKinsey reports that the much maligned broadband, may actually have delivered on its promise and may be reaching maturity. Only one problem with the report.

What's their definition of broadband? And yes it does matter.

TiVo: Home Media Option Hacking

2003-04-11T12:11:00-04:00

Speaking of TiVo's Home Media Option, apparently there's an SDK, and well, some folks have already started hacking away.

The street finds its own uses.

Cringely: Shaggy Dog Story

2003-04-11T12:03:00-04:00

Frankly, I feel Robert X. Cringely is worthy of a post every week, but that would get redundant. However, this week's piece from The Pulpit, covers new tech, media, and hacking. How could I not point to it?

Cringley burns off a few words on some lame dog hallucination, but then launches into how to hack fiber optic cables, Microsoft's plans for the Windows Media format, and what the TiVo Home Media Option really means. Good stuff all the way around.

Mayfield: Markets, Technology & Musings

2003-04-10T00:49:00-04:00

Before the Berkeley Weblogs Panel, described below, Ross Mayfield will be speaking. He strikes me as having interesting takes on so-called "social software" among other things.

UC Berkeley: Weblogs, Information & Society

2003-04-10T00:37:00-04:00

Continuing in a series of interesting public events, the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism is running a panel on Weblogs, Information, & Society. The panel features topnotch folks such as Dan Gillmor, Scott Rosenberg, and Ed Felten.

Why isn't stuff like this happening at Northwestern University?

Memo to self: get off your ass and jam

Graham: The Hundred-Year Language

2003-04-09T23:20:00-04:00

Paul Graham is arguably our most eloquent statesmen regarding populist thinking about programming language design and implementation. In his essay on "The Hundred-Year Language", he ranges on a number of topics on the trail of thinking about a programming language from 100 years in the future. Java is an evolutionary dead in. Parallel programming won't really matter (but parallelism will). Perl actually has some good ideas.

There are two really great features of this essay. First, despite being a top notch Common Lisp hacker, he never comes across as a bitter Lisp burnout. Second, the discussion inspires thinking about a language 100 years in the future because it might actually be useful today. This essay should be required reading for any aspiring programming language designer.

Western Digital: 250 GB Add-On Storage

2003-04-09T22:21:00-04:00

For $450 (MSR), you can soon get 250 GB worth of storage to hang off of your TiBook with a FireWire attachment.

Yowsa!!

Salo & Pilgrim: MT Template Tutorial

2003-04-09T22:04:00-04:00

Mark Pilgrim collects links to Dorothea Salo's explanation of how templates work in Movable Type. I've pretty much figured the dang things out myself, but there are still nooks and crannies that befuddle me. Besides taking care of my intro text needs for future students hacking with me, I'm hoping there's enough depth to clear up some of my own confusion.

Memo to audience: stuff like this is why MT is the tool of thought leaders in weblog tech

Mahmoud: Bluetooth Overview

2003-04-09T15:59:00-04:00

Now that I have a couple of whizzy new iPaqs with Bluetooth baked in, I thought I'd learn how to program them. The state of documentation available for developers is, shall we say, less than desirable.

Net searching with Google, I managed to find one article by Qusay Mahmoud that at least gives a nice overview of Bluetooth and how you might program for it. This is in marked contrast to the horror show in the bowels of the Microsoft's MSDN documentation on Bluetooth, shudder...

NMH: Embedding == Embrace & Extend?

2003-04-08T19:55:00-04:00

Martin Walker's article on how media in Iraq are becoming buddy, buddy with the military supports an analogy that's been growing on me. Embedding reporters into military operations bears a striking similarity to Microsoft's philosophy of "embrace and extend".

Memo to audience: sprinkle with chilling theme music as you see fit

Savard: Mozilla HTTP Header Snooping

2003-04-08T13:30:00-04:00

The livehttpheaders project is an addon for Mozilla to see all the meta-stuff that gets shipped between your browser and a Web server. Very useful for debugging Web apps.

/. : Review of Extending & Embedding Perl

2003-04-08T11:45:00-04:00

I can't quite figure out who wrote this review of Extending and Embedding Perl, by Jenness and Cozens, to give proper attribution. However, the review is mostly positive for a book I sorely needed for my scripting languages course this past fall.

Memo to self: time for a review copy

TiVo: Home Network Integration

2003-04-07T22:11:00-04:00

The latest version of TiVo plays really with others, but especially Macs. Thank you Rendezvous!

Possi: 3G vs WiFi

2003-04-06T19:35:00-04:00

Petri Possi, of the Mobitopia crew, notes the arrival of gear that makes 3G a viable alternative to WiFi. Since 3G in the US is an oxymoron, this probably only has practical import in Europe. However, that's nothing to sneeze at. The beautiful thing is that apparently both cellular carriers and unlicensed folks can play in this arena. Seems like fertile competitive ground.

Hutteman: SharpReader

2003-04-06T19:31:00-04:00

SharpReader is one of those new RSS aggregators. It's written by Luke Hutteman. SharpReader's wizzy new feature is that it shows outbound links in a threaded view. You've gotta see the screenshots for this to make sense.

Memo to audience: USENET will be completely reinvented eventually

Wilson: RSS Aggregators and .Net

2003-04-06T19:23:00-04:00

There's been a mild explosion of RSS aggregators in recent days, many of them running on the .Net platform. Brad Wilson has kicked the tires on most of them and has a few suggestions for this new breed of RSS readers.

TinyApps.Org: Small is Beautiful

2003-04-06T19:21:00-04:00

Not that I'm using a Win32 OS on a daily basis, but if I did, I bet a number of apps pointed to by TinyApps.Org would wind up on my desktop.

Six Apart: MT Text Formatting Plugins

2003-04-05T23:32:00-05:00

Six Apart only seems to have this stale, tiny bit on using text formatting in MovableType 2.6x. I know I've blogged it before, but Timothy Appnel's treatise on writing Movable Type plug-ins has the goods on the innards of text formatting plug-ins. I finally put two and two together and realized that MT entries in XML can now be processed with XML tools, through text formatting plug-ins. Now Movable Type is even more attractive as RSS aggregation infrastructure.

NMH: Fightin' the Power

2003-04-05T23:26:00-05:00

Apropos of nothing, according to Google, I'm the top New Media Hack at the current moment. No blogroll, no self promotion, no commentary elsewhere. Power laws ain't manifest destiny.

Sony: Internet Plasma Idiot Box

2003-04-04T08:52:00-05:00

Sony's working on a plasma screen with Internet connectivity baked in. The net connection is intended to be used for streaming digital video to the device. All sorts of remote hosting and proxy based hacks come to mind.

Canter: Open Standards Efforts

2003-04-03T15:35:00-05:00

A colleague of mine directed me to Marc Canter's discussion of open standards to put more smarts on the Web, especially in the arena of collaborative content generation. Mainly I'm getting the link out of my inbox and into this blog before I accidentally delete it.

Memo to self: read, review, followup

CanWest: Multimedia E-Newspapers

2003-04-03T11:33:00-05:00

CanWest Global Communications is going to start delivering multimedia e-newspapers according to Canada's National Post. The article is short on technical details, but the e-newspapers look like they'll be in a closed format (I'm guessing Flash or PDF) and contain embedded video. These new newspapers will also be tied to regular hard-copy subscription.

Memo to self: more investigation required

NMH: The Streak

2003-04-01T23:28:00-05:00

I started March with a goal to post once every day, come hell or high water. Mission accomplished. It wasn't amazingly difficult, but there were some sketchy moments. March entails the end of Winter quarter at Northwestern, so schedules get pretty tight. Plus, like a lot of other CS departments, we're in the middle of recruiting season, so there's an added burden. And I took two trips at the end of the month.

At this stage, I'm starting to look beyond the link/commentary style to something different. However, I don't really want to go infrequent essay style like many of the high profile bloggers. I've got a few ideas in the hopper, so expect some subtle, but interesting, changes ahead.

Memo to self: time for some analysis and reflection

Time: Cover Database

2003-04-01T23:20:00-05:00

In conjunction with its 80th anniversary, Time has put up a database of digitized covers going back to 1923. What a fabulous historical trove. This is a great example of content that can't really be done through any other medium. Tip of the hat to Steve Outing over at E-Media Tidbits.

Now of course the collaborative software hacker in me says, "wouldn't it be great if folks could build their own annotated scrapbooks and make them visible to others?" This can probably be easily done without AOL/TimeWarner's permission, but it would have been really forward looking if they had incorporated some ideas from Phil G. Why I bet they even could have gotten people to pay for access. Allow folks to build their own "80 Covers of History" and enter them into a contest. Charge $10 a pop. Laugh all the way to the bank.

Memo to self: new content based business model, authoring contests with Disney style peekaboo archives

NMH: Slow News Day

2003-03-31T21:22:00-05:00

Apropos of nothing, this is the first day in which I found not much of real interest in the news flow.

NMH: Online Kid Communities

2003-03-31T21:20:00-05:00

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

Apnel: mt-rebuild

2003-03-31T15:38:00-05:00

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.

NMH: Berkeley New Media Conference

2003-03-30T20:33:00-05:00

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.

Lee: 12" TiBook Review for Hackers

2003-03-29T10:48:00-05:00

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: Consumer Grade PANs

2003-03-29T10:41:00-05:00

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

Elin: Fotonotes.net

2003-03-29T10:35:00-05:00

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.

Shirky: Permanet vs Nearlynet

2003-03-28T17:06:00-05:00

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.

Lynch: Inside Macromedia Central

2003-03-28T16:37:00-05:00

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.

Macromedia: Flash on the Desktop

2003-03-27T10:04:00-05:00

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

Bury: eyebees

2003-03-26T09:09:00-05:00

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.

Lieberman: The Tyranny of Evaluation

2003-03-26T09:03:00-05:00

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.

Merrick: Nice Hack

2003-03-25T13:55:00-05:00

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.

Boyer: IndyJunior

2003-03-25T13:40:00-05:00

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

UCSD: Juss Press

2003-03-25T11:31:00-05:00

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.

Kanellos: Exceedingly Small Vision

2003-03-24T17:42:00-05:00

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.

Trotts: Trackback For Beginners

2003-03-24T17:24:00-05:00

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

Herz: Mod Culture

2003-03-23T18:14:00-05:00

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

Blood: 10 Blogging Tips

2003-03-23T18:00:00-05:00

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: Many Images, Few Words

2003-03-22T21:55:00-05:00

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.

McCoy: IMPBlog

2003-03-22T21:49:00-05:00

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.

Lawley: Improving MT

2003-03-22T21:40:00-05:00

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.

Katz: Revolution & AOL

2003-03-21T12:58:00-05:00

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

HP: Information Dynamics Lab

2003-03-21T12:03:00-05:00

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.

Sundgot: TI Wanda Details

2003-03-20T00:41:00-05:00

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

Appnel: MT Plugin Tutorial

2003-03-20T00:27:00-05:00

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

Gillmor: Cool New Phones

2003-03-19T13:11:00-05:00

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.

Alpern: Searching the BlogSphere

2003-03-19T13:08:00-05:00

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

Good idea++

Mobitopia: Coursey's Wrong

2003-03-19T13:05:00-05:00

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.

Dennis: Well If I Woulda Known!!

2003-03-19T13:00:00-05:00

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.

Hammersley: RSS Book

2003-03-18T15:33:00-05:00

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

Register: MS 2 Phone Hell

2003-03-18T15:28:00-05:00

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.

Seb: Open Research

2003-03-18T15:23:00-05:00

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.

Piquepaille: Social Network Tools

2003-03-18T15:16:00-05:00

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.

Neron: OpenBlogs

2003-03-18T15:12:00-05:00

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.

HP Labs: SWAD-E

2003-03-18T10:02:00-05:00

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

FastCompany: Googling Google

2003-03-17T12:00:00-05:00

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."

Holovaty: Online NCAA Brackets

2003-03-17T11:44:00-05:00

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!!

TI: WANDA, all in one wireless

2003-03-17T11:33:00-05:00

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.

Tcl/Tk: Aqua Version 8.4.2

2003-03-16T19:13:00-05:00

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.

Pilgrim: dive into mobile edition

2003-03-16T19:08:00-05:00

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

UTK: LoCI

2003-03-16T19:03:00-05:00

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.

EETimes: Centrino DOA

2003-03-15T14:47:00-05:00

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.

Lynch: NTT DoCoMo Vision 2010

2003-03-15T14:42:00-05:00

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.

Lynch: Macromedia.com relaunch

2003-03-14T17:13:00-05:00

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.

Naz: Trotts In My Backyard

2003-03-14T09:49:00-05:00

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--.

Challender: Big Word Fu

2003-03-13T22:17:00-05:00

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?

Lasica: Random Acts of Journalism

2003-03-13T13:58:00-05:00

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.

FuzzyGroup: Feedster

2003-03-13T13:46:00-05:00

Remember Roogle? Now it's Feedster.

AOL: Advertising--

2003-03-12T14:55:00-05:00

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

Ruby: Weblog Scalability

2003-03-12T14:40:00-05:00

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.

Aizai: Multimedia RSS Network?

2003-03-11T15:15:00-05:00

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

CNet: Wi-Fi Marches On

2003-03-11T11:17:00-05:00

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.

Halavais: Blogging Panel @ AIR IRC

2003-03-11T11:12:00-05:00

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

Dawkins/Kovach: Defining Journalism

2003-03-10T18:04:00-05:00

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: Java++

2003-03-10T17:53:00-05:00

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.

Shirky: Social Software & Politics

2003-03-10T16:09:00-05:00

What he said.

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

FuzzyGroup: RSS Search

2003-03-09T15:53:00-05:00

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

Castañeda: Teaching Convergence

2003-03-08T18:47:00-05:00

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.

Ito: Cell Phones & New Social Rules

2003-03-08T18:07:00-05:00

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.

Searls & Weinberger: World of Ends

2003-03-07T23:30:00-05:00

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.

USA Today: Analyzing Barry Bonds

2003-03-07T18:26:00-05:00

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.

Watts: New Science of Networks

2003-03-07T17:56:00-05:00

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

UMD: J-Lab

2003-03-07T16:27:00-05:00

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

Ivory et. al.: IT & Society

2003-03-06T15:04:00-05:00

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

JupiterMedia: Weblog Conference

2003-03-06T09:57:00-05:00

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.

Register: Linksys Wi-Fi

2003-03-05T10:59:00-05:00

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.

Hughes: Community in RSS Aggregators

2003-03-05T10:46:00-05:00

Great minds think alike. Sterling Hughes' speculation is perilously close to what I'm trying to do with NusFlows (decloaking soon).

Simmons: On NetNewsWire

2003-03-04T23:00:00-05:00

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.

Obasanjo: RssBandit

2003-03-04T21:02:00-05:00

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

Richards Interactive: Project Blogger

2003-03-04T20:53:00-05:00

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.

NMH: Brush With Greatness

2003-03-04T08:08:00-05:00

I'm on a panel today being run by Medill. A few journalists are on board, including Dan Gillmor.

CSM: Politics and The Web

2003-03-04T00:19:00-05:00

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.

Wilcox: PageRank 2.0

2003-03-03T23:56:00-05:00

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.

DP Review: Minolta Messenger

2003-03-02T17:56:00-05:00

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?

NewsLab: Online TV Research and Training

2003-03-02T16:20:00-05:00

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.

Dennis: Ignorance--

2003-03-02T10:28:00-05:00

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

Hammersley: Cool Weblog Hacks Book

2003-03-01T15:11:00-05:00

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.

Winer: FrontPage Blogging

2003-03-01T15:00:00-05:00

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

OJR: Japan Media Review

2003-03-01T14:34:00-05:00

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.

Hodder: Stupid Technorati Tricks

2003-02-28T21:18:00-05:00

Mary Hodder documents interesting usage of Technorati.com to find weblog linkages, and even better, per item linkages.

Memo to self: dig into Technorati

dotJournalism: On RSS Feeds

2003-02-28T20:54:00-05:00

Nothing particularly new to fans of The RSS Network in an article on how RSS, "...will re-shape the way online news is published...", by Caroline White. However, the explanation of RSS and aggregation is nice and tight. Also, lists some major media, "...offering their own news feeds, or employing journalists who do..." Now why'd she have to go and add that last little bit?!

Dennis: Streak Over

2003-02-28T19:58:00-05:00

Not a big fan of going meta in this space, but please observe a moment of silence for the death of my 10 day posting streak...
...
Okay back to work.

Dennis: It's the Access Stupid

2003-02-26T09:24:00-05:00

In an article describing his new role at Harvard, Dave Winer fires on the journalistic establishment again, claiming that weblogs are replacing traditional media organizations. Obviously, in a macro sense I agree with him, but I have one major point which I've never seen raised and which tempers my enthusiasm.

Due to their standing and reputation, major news organizations have access privileges that mere mortals don't.

Of the following two phone calls to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. which one has a higher chance of getting through?

Hi, I'm J. Random Luser. I'm working on a piece about Mr. Bush and would like to verify some quotes.

Hi, I'm J. Random Luser with The New York Times. We're working on a piece about Mr. Bush and would like to verify some quotes.

Winer's analysis focuses on extremely public events which require no access privileges. Anyone can watch and report. This breaks down when you need to get into the board room, the locker room, the committee meetings, etc.

Memo to self: hijack NetLogo for large scale multi-agent simulation of media effects

Holovaty: Interactive Online Politics

2003-02-25T00:20:00-05:00

Andrew Holovaty notes some interestingly subversive usage of online interaction in support of a newspaper 's mission of keeping the public trust. At least subversive is how I interpret it. Frankly, politics and technology while combustible, is one of computing's final frontiers. Maybe journalism and online media is the entree.

The stuff Holovaty is doing is so cheap, technologically, that every damn newspaper should do it.

Atlantic Monthly: On Introverts

2003-02-24T21:51:00-05:00

All I have to say is damn straight!!

If you know me, you know why this Atlantic Monthly article on introverts is so relevant. If you don't know me, read it to get a taste of what I'm like.

Either way pay attention!!

NTT DoCoMo: Flash Inside

2003-02-24T21:40:00-05:00

More mojo and motivation for MochaTime: NTT DoCoMo announces that i-Mode will support Flash.

I'm actually conflicted. More Flash engines in the world is good (really). Flash on a phone is pretty crappy.

But on a PDA? Me gusta!

Dr. Paul Carter: Beginner C Errors

2003-02-24T21:35:00-05:00

Dr. Paul Carter highlights some common pitfalls for novice C programmers. Given I have to teach the second quarter of the CS intro sequence next quarter this might actually be useful. Via Duncan's Jotter.

Memo to self: get to to work on that CS 211 syllabus.

NYTimes: Google & Pyra

2003-02-24T21:25:00-05:00

The paper of record adds it's two cents on the Google purchase of Pyra. Even the intrepid Gray Lady can't do much more than "future too cloudy." Mostly they pick up on the various ideas kicking through The RSS Network (TM).

I'm sticking to the network news weather service, knowledge management tools, publishing thought leader cocktail as what Google wanted to slurp. Nothing individually distinctive but the whole kit n' caboodle tastes mighty nice.

Pivot: Webloging Tool++

2003-02-24T21:12:00-05:00

Pivot is a weblogging tool completely written in PhP. One more thing to feature compare with MovableType. The programmatic Perl API to MovableType is still the secret weapon standard. Via Steve Mallett.

Park: Rebooting SF Examiner

2003-02-24T20:59:00-05:00

Don Park ruminates on restarting the currently defunct SF Examiner with a stable of webloggers. This echoes something I'd like to throw into the lexicon that I'm calling Emergent Journalism.

I have no illusions that the idea is particularly brilliant, especially since I just cooked up the term today, but the premise is this. Can a horde of cheap, bad reporters be steered, guided, influenced into generating some coherent patterns that emulate what we currently think of as "journalism"? The protozoic forms of this are Advogato, Slashdot, and Plastic. But what are the patterns of journalism?

In short, naysayers always focus on the micro level of individual namebrand webloggers, e.g. Glenn Reynolds. Is there anyway we can see the macro level and is there actually anything to see?

Question: What the heck does a defunct SF Examiner actually bring to the table? No money, no distribution channels, no advertisers, some administration and editors. Doesn't look like much.

Answer: Cachet, imprimatur, and reputation. Things that it looks like will take a while for a community of webloggers to earn.

Memo to major media: look out for that meteor!

Ito: Emergent Democracy

2003-02-23T16:11:00-05:00

Joi Ito's "Emergent Democracy" will be making the rounds. Looks like a buzzword compliant combination of swarm, power law, weblog, intellectual property, social networks and government. Coming from the Rheingold School of society and technology, I'm not sure about the depth. Actually I'll clamp up here, because I'm a big advocate of reading something before firing on it.

Memo to self: read closely, then fire.

Ward: Journalism Online

2003-02-23T16:02:00-05:00

Being a bit of a journalism outsider, I've missed Mike Ward's Journalism Online site and book. Scanning the table of contents it looks highly relevant to education in Medill, although the last couple of chapters focus on down and dirty web site development.

I wonder if taking up the cause of preventing journalists from building web sites would lead to martyrdom or sainthood. Teaching HTML to journalists, just say no! It's almost like teaching them to make their own paper.

Memo to self: investigate further.

QuickTime: Manipulation from Java

2003-02-22T12:33:00-05:00

Chris Adamson wrote a great article on manipulating QuickTime files using Java APIs. The article goes in depth on how to read the QuickTime file structure with Java and similarly how to write out QuickTime files. Also, there's mention that MPEG-4 is roughly QuickTime based so the same techniques can apply for what looks like might be the winning next generation multimedia document format. Apparently MPEG-4 has hooks to program interactivity through Java.

Adamson also points to an Apple tutorial on QuickTime, which helps in interpreting the structure and varied leaf nodes of a QuickTime file.

Memo to self: there's at least one popular multimedia file format that MochaTime could target

AOIR 2003: Call For Papers

2003-02-21T11:48:00-05:00

Not a while lot of time left, but the deadline for paper submissions to Association of Internet Researchers 2003 Conference hasn't passed. Mar 1 in case you're wondering. Conference held in October in Toronto.

News & Generation Net: New Media Conference 2003

2003-02-21T10:06:00-05:00

Boy USC and Berkeley don't make it easy to find out information about their annual New Media Conference. Actually, the problem may just be that Google is stuck on last year's conference as the top ranked page for those terms.

In any event, the lineup looks interesting and this year's focus is on the Net Generation, Gaming, and the news. Best of all, no registration needed, but a headsup e-mail (address on conference site) is requested.

NewsMonster: RSS Aggregator Without A Brain?

2003-02-20T09:37:00-05:00

Previously I blogged about NewsMonster. With a closer look all is not peaches and cream. NewsMonster is Mozilla based, so it's portable, but reports have it that how it operates is somewhat opaque.

Even worse, NewsMonster has an offline reading component, that crawls and downloads links embedded in RSS. As Mark Pilgrim has discovered, NewsMonster doesn't honor robots.txt. This is simply bad form and brainless.

However, it does bring up interesting questions regarding what a news aggregator is allowed to do. In some sense, what's the difference between NewsMonster and NetNewsWire + Chimera working together? Not much, other than tight integration between the aggregator and Web browser.

More to come...

Conference: Archives & Museum Informatics

2003-02-20T08:49:00-05:00

Digging through old e-mail, I found a link in Red Rock Eater for a conference on Archives & Museum Informatics. A quick scan indicates it's definitely not run by the traditional CS junta, but claims to be the premier conference on cultural institutions and the Web.

Since I'm working on a Web oriented project and class about the 1909 Plan of Chicago this might be an appropriate venue to report on what Carl Smith, Jonathan Smith and I have learned.

Memo to self: review current and prior technical programs for this conference.

Scanlan: Reject First Draft Mentality

2003-02-19T10:13:00-05:00

I've long been an adherent of "the only good writing is rewriting school." Which is somewhat anathema in the weblog community. Chip Scanlan, a writing coach at the Poynter Institute, has crystallized, better than I could, a number of salient reasons to plan and think around rewriting. Nothing earth shattering but it's always comforting to know that I'm in line with the guys who have to write on a daily basis.

Memo to self: reedit some of these older weblog entries.

Blogger & Google: Quiet Dogs

2003-02-18T19:49:00-05:00

The news that Google bought Pyra, implementers and service providers for Blogger, has been kicking around The RSS Network for a few days. It's a big net out there, but here's a question I have.

Why didn't they buy UserLand, LiveJournal, or Six Apart?

LiveJournal has a huge user community, but is mostly a grass roots, open source effort. There's really nothing to buy.

Some will claim that Dave Winer's irascible personality might preclude purchase by anybody. That would be bad business and I'm guessing wouldn't matter to Google. Mavericks and Google go together. Plus, UserLand has been marketing Radio Userland as a knowledge logging tool, making it buzzword compliant for a number of corporations. The UserLand blogging code base is mostly in UserTalk, a language which is probably a bit foreign to Google. Digesting UserLand would be easier from the user base perspective, but harder from the code base perspective.

Six Apart is more interesting. MovableType is currently the most popular tool of thought leaders in the weblogging community. Especially those working on infrastructure hacks, although content folks are starting to swing around too. It's amazingly well engineered and Perl isn't completely anathema to Google. The team is small and well respected. The only missing piece of the puzzle is a large centralized community of users.

Conclusion: Google wanted a community to help better guide Google News. As a bonus, they get a codebase that they can easily digest and turn into a corporate product. On top of it all, by making Blogger more reliable, Google does good for a large number of users. The Blogger team still has a bit of a rep and they can call upon the Google smarties to try and get back out in front of, or at least near, the technology leaders.

Oh, and they beat Microsoft and AOL to the weblogging tool punch.

NewsMonster: RSS Aggregator With A Brain

2003-02-17T16:27:00-05:00

NewsRoom looks like competition for nusroom, or a potential platform to hijack.

Memo to self: investigate closely.

MovableType: v2.6 Unleashed

2003-02-13T23:22:00-05:00

Just when I thought I had 2.5 figured out, the Trotts go and release MovableType 2.6. Now I'll have to go and upgrade.

On second thought, wait for a few bugfix releases. V2.62 is probably more my speed.

Brent Simmons: Scripting the Browser

2003-02-13T09:39:00-05:00

Brent Simmons describes how he gets one click subscription from a Web page to NetNewsWire.

Memo to self: Can Chimera do that?

Amazon: The Secret Sauce

2003-02-11T23:16:00-05:00

A paper in IEEE Internet Computing describes the recommendation technique that Amazon uses, entitled Item-to-Item Collaborative Filtering.

Windows Blogging Tools

2003-02-11T00:21:00-05:00

Desktop tools for blogging to MovableType: w.bloggar blogBuddy slug

Memo to self: convince New Media Program to use desktop tools & MovableType instead of making students do hand HTML.

Mallett: Community

2003-02-10T23:12:00-05:00

Steve Mallett opines on the conjecture that humans have a "social capacity" of about 150 people in a community before they face overload. He seems to find compelling argument from Gladwell's "The Tipping Point" and Johnson's "Emergence...". I'm not sure if I buy it, but it's worth pursuing the original sources.

Memo to self: Read "The Tipping Point" and "Emergence". Yes, I'm ashamed, but ignorance is correctable.

Tablet PCs: The Hong Kong Take

2003-02-10T22:46:00-05:00

From Computer World's Hong Kong edition comes a slightly different take on the potential success of Tablet PCs. Conclusion? This is version 2.0 for Microsoft, so the next round will actually be good. Also, the devices can't compete with specialized devices for data entry but might be useful in vertical markets where an organization can't afford an R&D budget to build such devices.

Worst of all the dang things still have that prissy PC mentality. If you drop it, it's all over. Definitely a drag on utility.

Not So Fast My Friend: Sims Online

2003-02-10T17:34:00-05:00

Then again, maybe MMRPGs aren't all that. Seems like 'The Sims Online' ain't doing so hot. The article is fairly vague on reasons why, but the general theme of "nothing to do" came across. Seems to me an economy of activities built out of extensible mechanisms might help these guys out.

Newsday On Young Readers

2003-02-10T17:05:00-05:00

Newsday provides some statistical grist for the decreasing newspaper audience mill. Of note is the fast decline in the youth demographic, yet the fact that newspapers still provide the best penetration across many media, including the Internet.

Social Activism Online

2003-02-10T16:52:00-05:00

Not exactly new to those who have been keeping an eye on these things, but in these troubled times there are more instances of social activism spilling into Massively Multiplayer Online Games.

Shirky on Weblog Power Laws

2003-02-10T12:26:00-05:00

Now making the rounds is Clay Shirky's analysis of how weblog linkage will eventually follow the Power Law relationships seen in many other areas of computing. The gist is "them that has gets, them that don't don't".

Memo to self: read closely and note results here.

Japanese Push Frontier of Wireless News

2003-02-08T00:09:00-05:00

Lots of interesting nuggets in a teaser for Japan Media Review provided by the Online Journalism Review. Apparently, Japanese cell phone companies are targeting a new make of edge devices as a lucrative news content delivery platform. These things run Java and support downloadable applet type code. That must have Microsoft's panties in a bunch. Also, they can run background processes that have 'Net connectivity. Perfect microclients for the nusroom of the future.

Memo to the US. In regards to innovative cellular thinking, as Drew Barrymore says "And that's kicking your ass."

Ed Felten: Freedom to Tinker

2003-02-06T16:49:00-05:00

I didn't know Ed Felten ran a weblog. Apparently it's been going since we met at the DARPA ISAT Summer Study. If he can do a good job at one of these things, then I have absolutely no excuse.

Goldmine: UsabilityNews

2003-02-06T16:42:00-05:00

Thanks to Adrian Holovaty, I now have another trove of usability informtion, besides Jakob Nielsen. It looks like the Software Usability Research Lab, out of Wichita State, is providing a nice, online, peer reviewed venue for usability findings: UsabilityNews. The work appears to be indpendent of The Web, but quite applicable.

Missing The Point

2003-02-05T10:52:00-05:00

Newspaper operations are in a tizzy thanks to some success with Tablet PC delivery by magazines, according to Editor & Publisher. Towards the end of the article, a few publishing concerns claim that they can easily automate the task of converting pages into a format readable by Zinio's PDF-reader-on-steroids.

That's great, but a dead page is still a dead page. The point of putting the dang thing on a TabletPC is so that it can be interacted with. Otherwise it's Worse Than Paper (TM). Not going to be able to make it better by automated processing from pre-print. Heck, I can't even see a path to incorporating interesting Flash like dynamic content, which, while irritating, might actually be a step forward.

Smaller, Lighter, Flash Storage

2003-02-05T10:29:00-05:00

Fuji is now pushing yet another storage card format, especially for digital film. xD-Picture Cards are being touted as really small, really light, and really fast. My eye popped at the 8GB upper limit, with 5MB/sec read times and 3MB/sec write times. That's USB scales, I think, in something the size of coinage. And screw pictures, that's a whole lot of digital news and MP3s. The iPod could get even smaller!

WebWord Usability Blog

2003-02-04T22:54:00-05:00

The preceding note on The New York Times Online came to NMH from WebWord.com via 37Signals, Signal v Noise weblog.

Memo to self: add each one's RSS feeds to our NetNewsWire subscriptions.

NYTimes Online Designed Like ... Print?

2003-02-04T22:46:00-05:00

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that The New York Times is going to design its online pages to be much more like print pages. The article is a bit disingenuous in that the new design is sort of like NY Times print pages but is a little more inspired by opposite page ads in magazines. The nav will be pushed to the top, left side used for editorial, right side for advertising.

Warning. WSJ registration/lockdown/linkrot will probably occur. Hopefully, the same bits will show up in some other channel.

Memo to self: fork over the dough for WSJOnline.

Update on Digital Paper

2003-02-03T18:00:00-05:00

Two digital paper companies, E Ink and Gyricon Media are still pursuing the dream. Thanks to the economy though, they're now a little less pie in the sky and more focused on the bottom line.

Weviving WriteTheWeb

2003-02-02T23:51:00-05:00

WriteTheWeb, a blog about many differing aspects of writing on the Web, has returned.

Flunking Google News

2003-02-01T18:54:00-05:00

JD Lasica documents Google News failures in tracking the space shuttle Columbia story. Of course, if you ask me I'd tell you that a) Google News has to trail real outlets because it works off of their pages, and b) Google News fails because it doesn't watch what people are actually reading.

Too bad I wasn't thinking, or I would have tracked what plain Google gave as the top sites for a few keywords. Would Google Search beat out Google News?

Reuter's News Heat Index

2003-02-01T18:29:00-05:00

Jon Udell opines on feedback loops in data rich spaces. The key nugget in the piece for me though, is the description of how Reuters calculates its Heat Index, balancing # of stories filed, # of high priority stories as identified by editors, and # of hits to Reuters.com. This is the type of stuff that should be easily visible in socially translucent communities.

Following up on that, Jon links to a similar hack, with a geographic orientation: newsQuakes. Worthwhile remembering just for the JavaScript library that implements the hovers, although it's unclear how the story calculations are made.

BlogPlex: Oldie but Goodie

2003-01-31T00:30:00-05:00

Matt Mower expounds upon the concept of BlogPlexes, ridiculously easily formed communities centered around blogs. I find much that resonates but the analysis of why communities form somewhat lacking. In particular, getting a community to a self-sustaining configuration is quite difficult as evinced by any number of community dotcom craters. Also, attempting to form communities based upon post topics seems to be seeking too fine a resolution. For all its faults, no one's complained recently that there are too *few* Usenet newsgroups.

This item was reached through RidiculouslyEasyGroupForming which expands upon many of these issues and collects a number of other relevant efforts.

TrackBack NG

2003-01-30T21:06:00-05:00

TrackBack is one of those neat ad hoc technologies enabled by The RSS Network. The technology has reached critical mass though and design now needs to proceed in a more considered fashion. Or so says Timothy Apnel in his thoughts on "The Next Generation of TrackBack."

RSS + NNTP

2003-01-30T11:57:00-05:00

I've long thought the vector that The RSS Network is headed on is essentially a reinvention of NNTP. Modulo the efficient distribution of items.

DJ Adams has provided the technology prototype by combining NNTP and RSS. However, it's an open question whether the result can grab any social traction and large scale momentum.

MovableType 2.6

2003-01-28T23:14:00-05:00

Two features of the upcoming MovableType 2.6 seem prominent. The support for PostgreSQL and SQLite means DB drivers at the high end and the low end. MT on the high end means more blogs/processing per installation. MT on the low end means bleeding edge LAMP in one reasonable package.

Meanwhile, the text formatting is a welcome addition.

Still pining for entry headers/metadata though.

SI Goes to Digital Photography

2003-01-27T20:07:00-05:00

Sports Illustrated, one of the most profitable properties of AOL/WT, used digital photography to capture images of Super Bowl XXXVII, one of the most central events in US culture. If that isn't the official stamp of approval on a digital technology, I don't know what is.

Not really a news flash to those of us in computing, but sort of a last one out shut the door and turn off the lights kind of moment.

Edgie Awards

2003-01-27T20:00:00-05:00

The Newspaper Association of America runs a contest and awards prizes for the most innovative uses of digital media. Memo to self: take a look at the winners and see what common themes and motifs came out. What are the widgets that appeared most?

Artima.com Interviews

2003-01-27T09:56:00-05:00

Originally drawn in because of the Guido van Rossum interview, I've discovered that Artima.com has an overall good collection of interviews with prominent software developers.

Selling Those PDFs

2003-01-24T11:07:00-05:00

The Christian Science Monitor has a neat marketing angle for its online PDF version of the paper version. They bill it as the "Treeless Edition"!!. Personally, I think PDF replicas are a relatively unintelligent way to publish online, *but* this does highlight a value add that might be appealing to CSM readers.

RSS and The News

2003-01-24T10:22:00-05:00

Great overview/backgrounder by Rusty Coats on what RSS can do for news operations. Additional cred due to couching the tech in traditional newsie terms and appearing in a relatively straightforward press venue.

Similarly, JD Lasica has a news aggregator roundup in the Online Journalism Review. His take is couched as more of a time saver than a mechanism for news dissemination.

I'm starting to sense a gathering snowball of RSS acceptance outside of the technorati community.

In Defense of Monolinguism

2003-01-23T19:45:00-05:00

Many people are combining PhP and MovableType in interesting ways. However, there is a significant limitation. PhP has no direct access to the beautiful Perl API of MovableType.

Enter Mason. Perl based dynamic pages with much the same spirit of PhP. Yet since Mason is written in Perl, it can use the MT Perl modules. Meaning dynamically generated pages have access to the same store as MovableTypes static generation process. Cake and eat it too.

Vellum

2003-01-21T21:38:00-05:00

As Perl is to Python, so seems Vellum to MovableType.

[Via diveintomark.org]

Piling on SMIL

2003-01-21T20:57:00-05:00

So now the W3 is embarking on a mission to add synchronized text to multimedia, as if they didn't already have a standard (SMIL) that was supposed to cover that already. Weird.

My advice, stick with Flash.

Sam Ruby: Cohesion

2003-01-20T11:30:00-05:00

Sam Ruby tries to cohere various linking notification mechanisms (trackback, pingback, automatic linkback) around the types of group communication that they enable.

Drag to Blog

2003-01-18T15:32:00-05:00

Details of combining Folder Actions, AppleScript, and the Weblog API, to make blogging as easy as dragging a link to a folder.

Kung-Log Reworked

2003-01-18T15:24:00-05:00

Looks like Kung-Log has been reworked to use Cocoa instead of AppleScript. May have to kick the tires.

Via [0xDECAFBAD]

Understanding Information Architecture

2003-01-18T15:20:00-05:00

Rusty Foster of Kuro5hin fame, pens a nice article on "Understanding Information Architecture". Oddly enough, the piece resolves little about what an information architect actually does, but still has an interesting Q & A regarding the reworking of NPR's Web site.

Baseball Prospectus: Pay To Play

2003-01-18T15:11:00-05:00

Baseball Prospectus, a great baseball analysis and commentary site, is going from a free site to a subscription model.

Their writing is really good, but I'm not sure they have a strong enough hook and a big enough audience to support $39.95 a year. We'll see.

Mic Checka

2003-01-18T15:01:00-05:00

One two, one two!

Is this thing on.