Feedback loops - the act of measuring something on an ongoing basis, changes your future behaviour, because you remember and anticipate the recording of what you're about to do. Well designed feedback loops have made people drive safer, and lose weight. Could the same design principles help employees work better? Read more – ‘The measured employee’.
At least once a month I find myself talking about the the ‘reverse bell curve’ idea - the traditional 'middle' distribution of 'stuff' seems to have completely reversed, and now 'everything' is distributed to the extremes; politics, wealth, employment, food, consumer goods, media... Read more – ‘The reversing of the Bell curve’.
Every morning, at 11am, a handful of FT journalists get together and run a simple web-based chat session for about 30 minutes. It's a talk between smart colleagues; insidery, stuffed with early-stage ideas, company news and theories being bounced around.
What if this model was replicated inside a Company?
Read more – ‘Pinching an idea from the Financial Times’.
It's helpful to frame the Wiki vs. SharePoint question by looking at how they support ideas emerging from informal ad-hoc collaboration into formal 'published information and 'micro-processes'...
Read more – ‘Wikis vs. SharePoint?’.
The creator of PowerPoint reminds us that a PowerPoint presentation was never supposed to be the entire proposal, just a quick summary of something longer and better thought out...so why do we use it to distribute ideas? Read more – ‘PowerPointless?’.
Notes from a response I'd given to a consulting company about their approach to supporting/using wikis within schools. Pretty much all of it was directly analogous to using wikis in organisations (at least those companies where employees are primarily knowledge-workers). Read more – ‘Objections to wikis in companies’.
There’s a lot of ebook devices out there (Kindle, Sony reader, Iliad et al), and obviously the iphone/touch and other mobile phones. The one technical feature that I think makes a device suitable for extended text reading is the pixel density of the screen. Here’s a good illustration of the effect of pixel density. A [...] Read more – ‘The forgotten perfect ebook device’.
O’Reilly’s ‘Rough Cuts‘ are a great idea – books in progress that you can subscribe to as they develop. Here’s one for Google’s SketchUp app. This open authoring progress seems to have become an established model for tech publishing; Pragmatic Programmers have their ‘beta’ books that offer immediate access to early draft PDFs along with [...] Read more – ‘Early access to a book’s development’.
I only realised today that there's an RSS feed for my unread articles queue - here it is , if you're interested in my inadvertent web curation... Read more – ‘My Instapaper unread feed…’.
I was asked what I thought about Twitter and it's potential, or rather the concept of Twitter, for business use (I should have restricted my reply to 140 characters)... Read more – ‘Thoughts on Twitter’.
The Media Equation – Will Someone Please Invent iTunes for News? – NYTimes.com “Those of us who are in the newspaper business could not be blamed for hoping that someone like (Steve Jobs) comes along and ruins our business as well by pulling the same trick: convincing the millions of interested readers who get their [...] Read more – ‘Will Someone Please Invent iTunes for News?’.
Not sure of my travel plans, so might not be in/near London at the right times, but these look like interesting talks for Jan/Feb 09 (in case you’re reading an archive )… Peter Greenaway on the New Visual Literacy “…he comes to the ICA to argue that the world of text is giving way to [...] Read more – ‘Interesting ICA talks in Feb 09’.
From Chapter One, “The Invention of Air“, Steven Johnson: “On alternating Thursday, a gang of freethinkers – eventually dubbed the “The Club of Honest Whigs” by one of its founding members, Benjamin Franklin – met at the coffeehouse (in the shadows of St Pauls), embarking each fortnight on a long, rambling session that has no [...] Read more – ‘London Coffee Houses of 1765’.
Wow, Apple’s new version of Pages includes a proper outliner. Great stuff…nice to see outlining as a writing/thinking tool getting prominence _and_ actually being decent (MS Word’s outliner is frankly, shit). Also nice to see in Pages, and obviously influenced by WriteRoom, is the new fullscreen view. I use iWork pretty much every day (still haven’t [...] Read more – ‘Apple’s Outliner’.
I’m writing this more for personal reference than any sort of analysis, but I like the idea of capturing notes here, without feeling like I need to do any analysis (a bit like how I share things I’ve read on Google Reader in the sidebar —> ) A quick scout through waxy.org’s links got me [...] Read more – ‘Mining social media for insights’.
Fascinating story in Wired about how scientists have hacked consumer cellphone cameras to do cheap and quick blood analysis. Analysing blood for signs of disease and infection previously required equipment that cost tens of thousands of dollars. I presume this would work even more effectively with cheap consumer digital cameras? Stories like this reaffirm my [...] Read more – ‘Scientists Hack Cellphone to Analyze Blood, Detect Disease’.
Just been grokking Google’s launch of their SearchWiki enabled search results, in a collaborative review with Simon Wheatley. This is a big deal, I think; Google acts as the de facto interface into the web for a lot of people and this new annotation functionality is available for _everyone_ with a signed in Google account. [...] Read more – ‘Google’s new ‘SearchWiki’ feature’.
There’s an interesting comment thread, Is the form in conflict with the aims? (complete with troll!) on ‘The Golden Notebook‘, the collaborative reading project I mentioned earlier this week. The thread is a nice summary of a few concerns that some readers have (whose being paid, does the structure work? Why limit the main page [...] Read more – ‘Golden Notebook project – discussion on structure’.
Remember the Playstation EyeToy? Here’s a technology preview using a webcam and -printed- (no printer, so I figured a scribbled logo would work just as well – it did)… The video on the site shows it in action… I can this imagine printing off a bunch of symbols, drawing live paths for the game characters, [...] Read more – ‘Augmenting reality’.
Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook is a rather wonderful experiment in collaborative reading; an elegant pairing of WordPress and Vanilla, blended with an important literary text and a clique of literary critics collaboratively reading, and passing comment page by page. I’ve been meaning to write about this for a few weeks, but keep putting it [...] Read more – ‘Collaborative reading’.
A fairly anodyne interview with the guy responsible for Kindle. Didn’t learn anything new, but if completely avoiding answering a question shows a discomfort about a topic, then e-reader apps on the iphone are either a cause for concern, or an acquisition target: “Q: I read that Stanza, an electronic book reading application for the [...] Read more – ‘Q&A: Ian Freed of Amazon Kindle’.
NYTimes.com: “Mr. Obama’s memorandums and briefing books were seldom printed out and delivered to his house or hotel room, aides said. They were simply sent to his BlackBerry for his review. If a document was too long, he would read and respond from his laptop computer, often putting his editing changes in red type… …But [...] Read more – ‘The paperless President’.
Hmmm. Let me just say I like 3; they’re a truly innovative telco, able to take the pricing and application openness risks the larger incumbents are unwilling (such as pay-to-receive offnet calls, and openly supporting/encouraging Skype on data tariffs). Facebook on mobiles is being marketed as a USP; Vodafone in the UK have been running [...] Read more – ‘3 launches ‘Facebook phone’’.
Google.org’s Flu Trends is a fascinating attempt to map emergent trends based on their insight into geo-based search terms (“tickly coughs”, “where can I get headache medicine”). Larry Brilliant talked about his idea to use search terms as a trend analyser for pandemic outbreaks on TED.com. It’s an extraordinary idea…for once a good example of [...] Read more – ‘Google flu tracking’.
A nice piece, The Media Equation in the NYTimes, examines the Obama campaign’s highly effective use of social networking to power their campaign. Its a lot more optimistic than the assessment I made yesterday about how the campaign used technology. As I argued yesterday, the article points out that Obama’s use of social networking has [...] Read more – ‘NYTImes – How Obama Tapped Into Social Networks’ Power’.
I’ve spent spare moments over the last few days ploughing through Newsweek’s excellent ‘insider’ coverage of the presidential campaigns. Consisting of a bunch of breezy essays, it’s methadone for a US political junkie in the UK. It’s worth ploughing through (best through their print versions and Instapaper) for the personality profiles; the Clinton and McCain [...] Read more – ‘Obama’s facebooking of political campaigning’.
Interesting – Harvard has pulled out of their book scanning agreement with Google, saying the recent legal settlement with publishers doesn’t allow for the public access to Harvard’s text, as they’d previously agreed: “The settlement provides no assurance that the prices charged for access will be reasonable,” Darnton added, “especially since the subscription services will [...] Read more – ‘Harvard Says no (more) to Google Books’.
Quite a while ago (er, actually a year ago) I read a couple of great posts by Tim O’Reilly outlining his wishlist for iphone apps and the potential for mobile operators to enhance their customer’s social networking reach. One of the posts outlined a great idea for an upcoming call queue app for the iphone; [...] Read more – ‘Upcoming Call Queue for iPhone’.
Terrible pun, sorry. Anyway, in a recent post on Google Books, I linked to a fab New Yorker essay; Future Reading. It takes a grand, historical view of libraries and the increasing sophistication of book cataloguing from Alexandria to Google; it’s a fascinating view of attempts to manage the ever increasing volume of humanity’s knowledge [...] Read more – ‘Google Books – the prophet margin’.
Nice NYTimes write-up of Johnny Chung Lee, the guy who released all those cool videos of wii controller modifications (remember that incredibly cool 3D screen manipulated by a helmet mounted wiimote?). Turns out releasing all his ideas so openly, via YouTube videos (6ml viwers!), and how-to build guides, worked out pretty well; his self(less) promotion [...] Read more – ‘Sharing Ideas is a good idea’.
Google finally settled their (US) wrangle with book publishers, which means Google will unlock their display of book content, with reciprocal ad revenue share to publishers. Google published an exceptionally clear explanation of how this changes the Google Book service . Anything that enhances access to books (particularly textbooks) and out of print books without [...] Read more – ‘Google extends Book Search’.
The Long Now Blog » Blog Archive » Eno Blooms Brian Eno collaborates with Peter Chilvers for an iphone app…that basically ticks every box for me… In a similar vein, I’d love to see Electroplankton ported to the iphone. Read more – ‘Eno’s Blooms’.
Rands In Repose: FriendDA: “The FriendDA is a non-binding, warm blanket agreement that offers absolutely no legal protection. I’d suggest if the idea of legal protection is even crossing your mind that the FriendDA is totally inappropriate for your current needs.” Lovely – my friends and I bounce ideas off eachother all the time, and [...] Read more – ‘Rands In Repose: FriendDA’.
Andy Baio and Joshua Schachter created this fantastic Firefox plugin that Visualises Political Bias on Memeorandum (a US-centric political news+blog aggregator) by highlighting perceived dem/rep red or blue. Memeorandum is focused mainly on showing blog conversations around key news stories… As the story about the investigation into Palin’s -(alleged)- abuse of power investigation broke this (UK) [...] Read more – ‘Visualizing Political Bias?’.
The video from the micropresentations slot at Reboot 10 has been posted…gives me a chance to enjoy the presentations (I was a constantly checking to make sure people were lined up and Keynote didn’t crash!). Some great presentations in there; some of the presenters really shine and get over some dense info…and I think the [...] Read more – ‘Micropresentations at Reboot 10’.
I just read this “article on Wired”:http://crowdsourcing.typepad.com/cs/2008/08/and-the-rheingo.html, from the author of a “2006 Wired article”:http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/crowds.html on CrowdSourcing, and a “recent book”:http://www.amazon.co.uk/Crowdsourcing-Power-Driving-Future-Business/dp/1905211112/ Nice summary of current corporate activity in this field, with the obligatory mention of “Dell’s Ideastorm”:http://www.ideastorm.com/ and “Starbucks Ideas”:http://www.mystarbucksidea.com which are both fantastic examples of companies doing idea-lab initiatives well. The article mentioned a [...] Read more – ‘Crowdsourcing Lessons Learned’.
This week, I’ve experienced a wonderful example from the two sides of the internet-as-collaborative-tool bell curve this week. First up: PublicMarkup.org. A great use of the internet; a publically ‘comment-able’ version of the US Treasury proposal to create the infamous $trillion debt purchase… Dodd’s Legislative Proposal From Treasury Department for Authority to Buy Mortgage-Related Assets [...] Read more – ‘two great examples of ‘only on the internet’ collaboration’.
I previously wrote about Flat World Knowledge, a startup dealing with Academic Textbooks, so I was pleased to read in the NYTimes about a professor who has used the service (and Lulu) to self-publish his Economic textbook. The novelty of this model will, of course, fade over time, but it does look likely that textbook [...] Read more – ‘More on Open TextBooks’.
See that drop on the left? That’s the 75% dip in United Airlines stock price last week, caused by a six year old story about UA’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy application appearing in various aggregated newsfeeds, and taken as a current story. It’s an interesting example of the speed and interconnectedness of information flow on the web, [...] Read more – ‘Trusting the web; what companies have to learn’.
What Your Global Neighbors Are Buying is a superb use of a treemap. It benefits from the added visual structure of relative placement of the countries; placement is something most treemaps don’t benefit from. And the subtlety of the colour gradient is really nicely done; the overall effect is one of initially very simple mapping [...] Read more – ‘superb treemap’.
Ah, that sad story about the decline of a awesome North Manchester radio station looks like it maybe have a happy ending…the people (DJs and staff) who made ‘the Rev’ such a unique are setting up a new venture. I hope I can support them with a few quid. If you’re in Mancs, and want [...] Read more – ‘Revolution matures into a Republic’.
This is a a sad story about the death of local media here in Manchester, UK… Revolution FM is an Oldham based station radio, with (I think) some financial backing from Steve Coogan and DJs from the Mancunian/NW music scene. I used to love listening to them – a great alternative Radio station; felt quintessentially [...] Read more – ‘The end of a Revolution’.
From the about bloody time department: Open Source Textbooks Challenge a Paradigm | Epicenter from Wired.com Spent some time reading about their model. Good stuff – focus on the lecturers creating a customised book, and creating demand (sofar, so traditional) and let the book act as the centre of a hub of pedagogical tools. Neat [...] Read more – ‘Open Source Textbooks’.
37signals Product Blog: A BaseCamp message informed me that 37Signals are dropping support for IE6. Good news. IE6 has personally cost me thousands in extra development efforts over the years – it’s a non compliant nightmare. Trouble is, the glacial pace of change in many corporate IT depts means that IE6, a seven year old [...] Read more – ‘37signals phasing out support for IE6’.
Apparently Google released some more info on their open source browser project today. All looks great, however, what got _me_ really excited was the Scott McCloud produced promo booklet they commissioned (slide show here) Perfect way to get geek attention, methinks (and no copies on ebay yet). More seriously, cartoon (and even just drawing in [...] Read more – ‘Scott McCloud and the Google browser’.
Interesting review of Google’s slow inroad into mainstream IT. Key points: * Gen Y isn’t yet in charge of corporate IT decisions. Change is slooow. * Google Apps is still a ‘consumer’ set of apps (e.g. lack of records management) * Apps is basically a ‘online’ version of Office – not much differention (e.g. document [...] Read more – ‘Google Apps and the Enterprise’.
Quicksilver, meet the Internet. Actually, that’s unfair, but it’s a convenient way to explain the concept (well, at least to a Mac user). Lovely to see the determination of Aza Raskin, whose devotion to the idea of a language based interface lives on from Humanized, and ends up in the current ‘OS’ of Firefox. The [...] Read more – ‘Language as an interface’.
This solves a personal 10 yr quest; Stewart Brand’s BBC TV series from 1997 ‘How Buildings Learn’ has been uploaded. The fantastic curated Smashing Telly spotted them and wrote a really good introduction to the series: “…Almost no computer software is actually designed by ‘architects’ who sit in between the people who commission software and [...] Read more – ‘How Buildings Learn – the full TV series online’.
Listened to this last night, via Speechification. Absolutely wonderful – if you watch telly, you should listen or watch this (Speechification has the audio as an mp3). Read more – ‘Stephen Fry’s brilliant review of the BBC’.
Just had an idea, which I’ve mailed to the Geekup mailing list, and thought I’d post here. I’ve been really impressed with recently released Silverback App – a Mac app, that utilises screen recording and the webcam on (recent) macs, to create a combined screen cam of people using an application. It’s a brilliant way [...] Read more – ‘Distributed usability testing with Silverback App?’.
Eating lunch today, I flicked through an old copy of Wired, and noticed a story about Google’s ‘Knoll‘ service, which is an interesting take on content creation. It’s basically a Wikipedia-like knowledge creation app, but the design focus is on identifiable individuals writing on a subject area; collaborators are also named. Examples given have been [...] Read more – ‘Google launches Knoll’.
CommentPress is a great initiative by the ‘Future of the Book Institute’ – a plugin/structural overhaul for a WordPress blog that enables documents to be presented, and commentable at a paragraph level. It’s used to particularly good effect to engender feedback for this UK government strategy paper on innovation. via Tom Watson. Read more – ‘CommentPress’.
I coulsn’t attend the 2gether ideas festival, but have been catching up with the videos and posts. Looked brilliant. One particularly lovely idea, in action, noless, is this guy, Simon Berry, who had the idea of Coca Cola using its distribution network to bundle much needed salts into various countries: “Our idea is: That Coca [...] Read more – ‘Getting Coca Cola to distribute rehydration salts…’.
BBC NEWS | Health | A 60-year revolution in surgery Of the millions of topics I know nothing about, medicine/healthcare is one of them (being so fit and all :-). So this list of innovations in healthcare is quite amazing. I think the ability to treat cataracts, and the eradication of smallpox are both ‘innovations’ [...] Read more – ‘A 60-year revolution in surgery’.
Read at Work Wonderful – full screen ‘Powerpoint’ formatted novels, for when the boss walks by. This is simultaneously amusing and depressing (I mean if you need this site, quit your job!) Read more – ‘Read at Work’.
Note: Evan Orensky, the ‘Dick Cheney’ of participo.com (i.e. he’s smarter than me, and more cunning :-) wrote this post: Having known Guy Dickinson, the proprietor of this blog, for 6 or 7 years, I can tell you that this is a man whose thoughts are never still. He calls it ADD, (as if it [...] Read more – ‘A quick glimpse into Guy Dickinson’s restless mind’.
A fantastic list of future scenarios from Kevin Kelly and Brian Eno. 15 years ago some of these predictions were far more outrageous than today, and some are more outrageous today than back then. We made short lists of ideas and emailed them to provoke each other. This is the aggregate of several rounds. They’re [...] Read more – ‘Unthinkable Futures’.
BBC NEWS | Politics | Online maps to show local crime An NGO (“crime and communities”) advisor has written a reasonable review looking at reactions from the ‘community’ re. crime. The headline on the news site is great, but I only see vague recommendations re. online crime stats, and no solid proposals to, say, engage [...] Read more – ‘BBC report that govt will build maps to show local crime’.
Pity it doesn’t exist I really like the effort (and hook at the end) that this chap has gone to, in order to mockup his dream text editor. Reminds me of Khoi Vinh’s mockup of BlockWriter asking for someone to build the ideal, distraction-free text editor. Which they did. Read more – ‘Prose – great writing app’.
Its that time of year again – a big, scheduled Apple keynote. I always get it wrong, so here’s my completely uneducated guesses on what will and won’t be announced: I think they’ll kill off ipod classic, we’ll see the framing of the ‘touch platform’ – I reckon Jobs will literally delineate the touch and [...] Read more – ‘Apple (mis) predictions’.
TechCrunch covers the new release of Google’s Gmail Labs here and here: “Gmail Labs is essentially a stage for Google employees to develop new features for Gmail under the public eye. Starting at 6pm PT tonight, all Gmail users in the US and UK will see a new tab in the settings area called “Labs”. [...] Read more – ‘GMail Labs’.
Fascinating, if a bit light on detail, NYTimes article on Google’s “Revenue Force”. Interesting to see them take the long view on ad revenue, where the goal is retain a user’s value from ads, not just goose short term revenue: “These factors contribute to an ad’s ‘quality score.’ The higher that score, the less the [...] Read more – ‘The Human Hands Behind the Google Money Machine’.
BBC NEWS – Tube drinks party sparks mayhem So, the last day of open drinking on the Tube network, and some bright spark(s) decide to convene and impromptu party to celebrate… Cue thousands(?) descending on the Circle Line for the last night of boozing… Could have been a wonderfully eccentric British bash, except it ends [...] Read more – ‘The ultimate flashmob’.
Cities and Ambition: “Great cities attract ambitious people. You can sense it when you walk around one. In a hundred subtle ways, the city sends you a message: you could do more; you should try harder.” Provocative article from Graham, who’s a big advocate of the influence and importance of place. I think he’s right [...] Read more – ‘Cities and Ambition’.
Reboot, Copenhagen in late June. As always, really looking forward to Reboot. Having been to quite a few ‘normal’ (and quite frankly, shit) conferences this year, it makes me even more appreciative of how fab reboot is. Looking forward to seeing my old friends from around the globe (just realised this is my fourth reboot…gulp!) Read more – ‘Reboot 10…’.
BBC NEWS | Business | Toyota acts on overwork culture “The decision follows a court ruling in Nagoya in November that a 30-year-old Toyota worker who collapsed at one of its plants had died of overwork.” So, an enlightened decision then? :-S I love Toyota as a brand (my Prius has been impecceble), but having [...] Read more – ‘Toyota acts on overwork culture’.
The Open Rights Group: bq. “The House of Commons Scottish Affairs Committee has released its report on the experience of the Scottish elections and unsurprisingly they are worried about e-counting. Last year ORG sent observers to the Scottish elections and observed many problems including the SNP nearly failing to win because of an Excel spreadsheet. [...] Read more – ‘The Open Rights Group: Scottish Affairs Committee recommendation on e-Counting’.
230 miles of love is a sketch show structured around different positions along the m6. Lovely idea – download it to a satnav, and it plays various sketches at relevant points on your journey. I’m intrigued (if a little sceptical), so I’ll try this on the way back to Mancs this week. Found this mentioned [...] Read more – ‘230 miles of love’.
ROADTOUR – Browse Heritage Sites is a lovelty idea (well, actually a mature product). Heritage site info, plugged into GPS navigation devices. I’d like this in my TomTom, as I nail up the M6, and persuaded to take a diversion, but it only works on Garmin devices for now. Even better would be geo-tagged wiki [...] Read more – ‘ROADTOUR – Browse Heritage Sites’.
About a year ago, I wrote that for me, Twitter would hit a ‘real world’ tipping point when it was used by active participants in a unpleasant event (I was writing this around the time of the Virginia tech shootings) to actively record the events as they unfolded. Well, browsing Techmeme, I see its happened, [...] Read more – ‘Twitter tipped…’.
Daring Fireball’s BlackBerry vs. iPhone is a brilliant write-up of the way in which the iPhone’s upcoming ’2.0′ software release _nails_ the BlackBerry device on all counts. Read it, if you care about portable computing devices and the near future of computing in general. So, yes, the iPhone (with 2.0 software) will create great demand [...] Read more – ‘Daring Fireball: BlackBerry vs. iPhone. Great, but what about the IT dept?’.
Followed a link from MyBikelane.com from an article in the NYTimes about car drivers abusing the partitioned bike lanes in NYC. Apart from the irritating disregard for the bike lanes (why don’t local govts just build a paved ridge, rather than painting…that creates a clear demarcation?) it’s a great example of citizen power. Particularly neat [...] Read more – ‘Cars parked in bike lanes in New York’.
BBC NEWS | Technology | Wiki pinpoints Brazilian crime: “” Fascinating story about a Google Maps powered wiki that lets Brazilian citizens report crime. “Like many in the city, I was hesitant about contacting the police. For some there is a feeling that there is little point; for others a general distrust of them. But [...] Read more – ‘Wiki pinpoints Brazilian crime’.
BBC NEWS | Business | The life of a New York broker A lightweight video, with an incredibly brief overview of trading…but really interesting however, to see the physical environment. E.g. the way that displays and positioning are used…everyone stands, eye-level monitors grouped together on ‘islands’, that make for walkable destinations and congration points for [...] Read more – ‘BBC News Business | The life of a New York broker’.
Nothing like being linked (and requested for feedback) in a blog post title ‘The Vision Thing‘ (admittedly, this post was from a pal, Paul Robinson, who is kindly inaccurate in including me, I think). Still, as always, he asks a good question; has the Internet turned erm, a bit shit? (cf. web2.0 zillion-dollar valuations, investments [...] Read more – ‘Vision Thing…it’s all about the people.’.
MySociety are running a wonderfully worthy campaign to ‘Free Our Bills‘ – a low-cost, easy way to open up the terribly antiquated format of Parliamentary bills, to enable public services like TheyWorkForYou to present easy to understand access to the laws that are created on UK taxpayers behalf. A worthy cause, if ever I saw [...] Read more – ‘Release our Parliamentary Bills!’.
I’ve just got round to reading ReadWriteWebs’s story on Amazon’s Shipping Centre APIs. Pretty incredible – I could basically build a physical goods company, with all inventory storage, shipping and returns handled without any upfront investment in infrastructure. I think this is an incredibly bold, innovative move by Amazon – makes my head spin with [...] Read more – ‘Amazon’s physical goods APIs released’.
iPlayer is brilliant – it lets me watch BBC TV at a schedule I choose, but it’s interface is a pain in the ass – lots of pretty pictures, but programmes listed in splayed episodes, alphabetically… iPlayerlist is a fantastic, highly usable interface for the BBC’s iPlayer (which is appallingly designed) – finally I can [...] Read more – ‘iPlayer – finally an interface I can use.’.
So, the -fairly useless- benign LinkedIn actually got really interesting, by adding a groups feature (by groups, of course, I mean companies). Now they have a decent core of data to mine, they’re able to show interesting aggregate data about employee flow, and hiring trends amongst other insights into companies. I think Ross Mayfield’s analysis [...] Read more – ‘LinkedIn groups’.
An interesting article, Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader Locked Up: Why Your Books Are No Longer Yours that reviews a recent legal review of ebook vendor’s legal agreements and ownership of the ‘books’ they sell. In short, as a DRM’d ebook buyer, you’re really entering a rental, rather than ownership agreement, and Amazon, Sony et [...] Read more – ‘Why Your (e) Books Are No Longer Yours’.
Charting The Banking Crisis – A Boomerang Demo is a Gapminder-like animated bubble chart of banking exposure to mortgage debt over the last year. I’m not sure it actually provides the same level of comparative insight as Gapminder – more a flow of a few variables that I already associate (size and frequency), than the [...] Read more – ‘Charting The Banking Crisis’.
Today, BBC News linked to a Nov 2007 explanation of the sub-prime fallout. Apart from being prescient, it’s one of the best ‘why it happened’ explanations I’ve seen, using a very simple method of a checkbox to overlay an explanation. Maybe this is too simplistic a thought, but putting aside capitalistic greed, corporate incompetence, short-termism [...] Read more – ‘Failure of Simplicity?’.
Barack Obama Campaign tools – I’ve signed up to various candidate’s email lists to see how they communicate (as a UK citizen, I’m in er. shock and awe at the slick campaign management). Amazing to see this campaign tool sent out to Obama supporters – a web app that pops up a phone number and [...] Read more – ‘Democrat’s call centre webapps’.
I recently listened to the Economist’s recent special report on e-government. I think the report was, by and large, accurate and to the point – the biggest lessons seem to be: * Its right and proper that citizens have access to and interact with local and national Governments (durh!). * Government IT projects cost a [...] Read more – ‘Where is the innovation in e-government?’.
Brilliant. I thought they must be doing something along these lines. TomTom have a with Vodafone (disclaimer, Vodafone are a client), to anonymously process the location and speed of Vodafone cellphones on roads (worked out from cell towers)…and relay this as traffic condition data to new TomTom devices with an embedded Vodafone SIM. Putting aside [...] Read more – ‘TomTom to use cellphone data to determine traffic conditions’.
That’s what I’m aiming for, as a consumer and producer. Most starkly felt at Reboot – where most definitely none of the attendees are punters, and all are participants, regardless of whether they’re speaking or not. That is all. Read more – ‘Participant not Punter’.
I’ve really enjoyed David Galbraith’s Smashing Telly, a fantastic curation of interesting TV shows. And recently, another site, Speechification started pulling together a lovely list of spoken Radio programmes. Speechification pushes their links through as a podcast feed as well. And Russell Davies, one of the guys behind the site has just launched Watchification, which [...] Read more – ‘Great media curation sites’.
The New Heavy Metal :: Innovation in Software :: The Vagueware Blog Paul Robinson links to a fascinating and appalling blueprint for Google’s new DataCentre. Although the energy is being generated by hydro-electric (and they’re investing in greentech in a big way), Paul points out that the cost of Google’s business is masked by this [...] Read more – ‘The New Heavy Metal :: Vagueware Blog’.
Dennis Howlett nails what I thought as soon as I heard WordPress were doing a lightweight Twitter called Prologue (actually it’s more microblogging, as no sms/email love) inside WordPress. The more widespread I see ‘consumery’ tech like this take off inside companies, the more obvious it becomes – companies are just _groups of people_ – [...] Read more – ‘Twitter for business?’.
The invisible computer revolution is a short, but compelling call to arms to build software services for the fast growing cellphone market in non-Western countries; sms updates for health-care workers as continuing education, for example. I often come across anecdotal references to farmers getting sms‘ (smsii?) on crop prices in adjoining towns and moving to [...] Read more – ‘The invisible computer revolution’.
Just saw this Kevin Kelly’s ace documentary reviews ebook linked up on BoingBoing. It’s a PDF in which Kelly (author, ex founder of Wired, CoolTools, etc etc) lists reviews of a bunch of decent documentaries…I micropaid for the PDF a few months ago. The PDF is now a free d/l…powered by sidebar Yahoo ads. Definitely [...] Read more – ‘True Films…’.
bq. “We wanted to reassure you that your order ********* has been upgraded and dispatched Saturday December 22 via Royal Special Delivery for a delivery Monday December 24. We know that holidays can be stressful and wanted to relieve a portion of that stress by reassuring you that your package is expected to arrive in [...] Read more – ‘Amazon doing customer service right’.
I just saw this incredibly simple, but profound list on how to teach, linked from Eliot Masie’s blog: * Short: “Keep it small and short” * Draw Pictures: “Make a point by drawing a picture in the dirt or on a piece of paper” * Laughter Reinforces: “Use jokes and kidding to ease the learning” [...] Read more – ‘The core of teaching…’.
Techcrunch is running a story from Google’s press release on ‘Knols’ (Techmeme discussion links here), user created chunks of info that will be the ‘first information people will want to see on a topic’. It’s another adwords trade-off; we as consumers get free content, Google gets ad-revenue (split with the expert author). As Wikipedia seems [...] Read more – ‘Google’s goldmine – your knowledge’.
I just posted this as a comment to a O’Reilly Radar post on Tom Tom’s new Google Maps integration, which is ‘post device’ (via syncing). (I’m recycling the effort I make writing comments/emails elsewhere). Actually, TomTom’s can ‘do internet’ on their devices in a non-integrated way – I have a two year old TomTom ‘One’ [...] Read more – ‘TomTom’s user data goldmine’.
One Laptop Per Child News: bq. “The problem with treating collaboration as cheating is that collaboration is precisely what children need to learn in order to succeed in business, science, government or anything else when they grow up and leave school. Hear hear. Read more – ‘collaboration vs. cheating’.
Bloody hell, Google just announced they’re becoming an energy company! More (but light) info here. Makes a lot of sense – renewable energy is a primarily a clean technology problem (vs. mucky industrial activity like digging for coal or drilling oil), maybe it makes sense that the emergent renewable energy company for the 21st century [...] Read more – ‘Googlewatt’.
Last night I posted on Seed, a new forum discussing the business of web apps, set up by my pals at Litmus. I was wondering about apps whose design focus is on the _actual_ experience of being with a mobile, vs. being optimised for mobile devices. I was trying to think of apps that are [...] Read more – ‘optimising for the experience of being mobile…’.
I was thinking about this last night – I don’t know (without doing any research, mind you) of any transferrable way of creating and sharing annotations for books. I’m thinking something along the lines of a ‘mapped’ outline/opml file, where the outline structure maps against chapters and pages of a book, and an ebook reader [...] Read more – ‘An idea for (e)book annotations’.
I’ve been digesting the news this week (and rumoured for the last 12 mths), that Amazon is launching its long awaited ebook reader: I’d written a few emails to a geek mailing list, before the device was officially announced and after the first wave of histrionic blog reviews came out. I thought I’d reuse those [...] Read more – ‘Thoughts on ebooks’.
Sandy — your personal email assistant looks really interesting… Basically – forward @whatever tagged based emails with some key verbs (‘remind’ ‘tell’ etc) and this system will parse this into a reminder system, squirting back reminder It’s based, I think on the Stikkit tech (certainly the same team). I really like the personalised faux human [...] Read more – ‘Sandy – personal email assistant’.
Ars Technica: bq. “Electronic Arts announced yesterday plans to donate the original version of the SimCity computer game to the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project so that it can be distributed to schoolchildren in developing countries on OLPC’s XO laptop.” And this gem from the person pushing this particular approach: bq. “”The goal is [...] Read more – ‘OLPC gets SimCity’.
Sad news. I’ve not read as much Mailer as one ought, but I remember as clear as day, sitting down and reading ‘The Fight‘, a fantastic evocation of the Ali/Forman fight. I was captivated by Mailer’s screen presence in ‘When We Were Kings‘ and rushed out to buy The Fight. And I saw a wonderful [...] Read more – ‘Norman Mailer 1923-2007’.
43 Folders has got a crazy (in a really good way!) conversation on building a document scanningworkflow for the Fujitsu ScanSnap check this automated nerdery out, it’s incredible: bq. “…These resultant pdf’s are then moved by the script to the main ‘files’ folder, where another python script…files them into subdirs based on financial year, or [...] Read more – ‘Paperless Office…’.
New York Times: bq. “The school asserts that the center, completed in spring 2004, has persistent leaks, drainage problems and mold growing on its brick exterior. It says accumulations of snow and ice have fallen dangerously from window boxes and other areas of its roofs, blocking emergency exits and causing damage.” Tidbits: * $15 million [...] Read more – ‘M.I.T. Sues Frank Gehry’.
Oh, it’s much more than a phone – it’s Google becoming the Operating System -vendor- benevolent dictator for the emerging dominant platform of this century – connected, portable devices. It was clear Google was on the verge of announcing something, framing the conversation – but in retrospect, the framing was all around ‘platform’ of handsets. [...] Read more – ‘Google mobile platform’.
Joi Ito has a fascinating writeup onOtetsudai Networks: > “With Otetsudai Networks, if you are willing to work, you sign up for the service with your skills and focus, take a GPS reading on your phone and then just hang out. If you are looking for someone for say… 3 hours to man a cash [...] Read more – ‘Joi Ito’s: Otetsudai Networks’.
You know Google is really close to announcing the Google Phone, when they make no official comment, but they run a puff piece on the ‘Head of Mobile Platforms’ talking about how cool he is, but with ‘no comment whatsoever’. It’s a gigantic framing exercise. Here’s two elements from the technique that are clearly being [...] Read more – ‘Google working the NY Times’.
The new version of SimCity, ‘Societies’ sounds pretty bloody good. According to [Scientific American](http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleid=FBCCCBC6-E7F2-99DF-3DED6620467D4CEF), a player (architect/urban planner?)’s focus will be: > SimCity Societies encourages its virtual architects to design cities that maximize any one of a number of different values, including authority, creativity, knowledge, productivity, prosperity and spirituality. Apparently BP [consulted on the energy [...] Read more – ‘SimCity Societies’.
This just came through from a newsletteradaptive path » making the most of a design engagement bq. “Here are Adaptive Path’s tips for our clients — or yours.” Great list… Read more – ‘making the most of a design engagement’.
Anthony Grafton on “Future Reading” is a really tight (I presume) overview of a long New Yorker piece on the impact of book/text digitization by Google. I’ve parked the New York article for later reading (I pop these interesting, but timesink articles into folders that pop on weekends :-) – this one is for the [...] Read more – ‘Future Reading’.
3, here in the UK, is constantly pushing the boundaries of the market. A lot of their disruption is around pushing new revenue models (or dropping prices), but they also push new services into the market at a fair clip. As an aside, they’re able and willing to push prices and services in this way, [...] Read more – ‘3 pushes out again’.
Ugh. I just noticed that, combining Participo email, gmail and some other sources (not including BaseCamp, or other systems, mind you), I’ve sent 5,633 emails this year (an average of 18.7 per day if you’re interested, like I was :-). I’ve also got over 24,000 emails, archived from over the years (and I toss a [...] Read more – ‘Whoops, I’ve sent 5,633 emails sent this year…’.
Dopplr Blog » In rainbows: “As you add trips to different destinations, Dopplr’s logo becomes your logo, reflecting what you’re doing – right the way through to the ‘favicon‘ that shows up in the address field of most browsers…” Lovely. Trouble is, I didn’t notice it – I often access the site through a mobile [...] Read more – ‘Dopplr Blog » In rainbows’.
Wii Sports dominates Bafta awards Great news and ‘intellectual’ confirmation for the Wii – but where’s the next Wii Sports? I’ve not seen as compelling a game in the year since I’ve had my Wii..(maybe the Super Mario?). I guess I want to see the new Electroplankton on the Wii. And not to cost £40 [...] Read more – ‘Wii Sports dominates Bafta awards’.
Diet and Fat: A Severe Case of Mistaken Consensus – New York Times: “If the second person isn’t sure of the answer, he’s liable to go along with the first person’s guess. By then, even if the third person suspects another answer is right, she’s more liable to go along just because she assumes the [...] Read more – ‘The stupidity of the herd’.
Craig Venter; Prepare For The BioHackers bq. “The big era will come when ourselves and others can produce enough biological fuel that we can crash the price of oil” Interesting overview of an interview with Craig Venter (the guy who mapped the genome). I keep thinking of the Sterling quote: “The future’s already here, it’s [...] Read more – ‘bio-engineering fuel for fun and profit’.
Brilliant: bq. “Tesco will use the Manchester Ship Canal to move crates of wine from South America from the Port of Liverpool and a container terminal at Irlam…The retailer says the move will mean hundreds of lorries can be taken off the roads, reducing congestion and cutting carbon emissions.” Read more – ‘Tesco to use canal to ship goods…’.
Apple – Mac OS X Server – Features – Wiki Server Friend pointed this out- a lovely looking wiki server in the new OS X server. Can’t figure out what the underlying technology running it is, presume it’s custom code…aforementioned friend is grabbing the developer beta now and will investigate… Along with the fab looking [...] Read more – ‘Apple – Wiki Server’.
The Register: bq. “French law prevents carriers from tying handsets exclusively to their networks – consumers have to be able to move to a different network provider and take their phones with them. The upshot is that Orange will sell a locked iPhone for €399 alongside an unlocked model for a price that’s yet to [...] Read more – ‘Sacre Bleu! Legit unlocked iphones for France’.
Following on from yesterday’s post about the lack of Mac/Lunix iPlayer, comes this news from PC Pro: bq. “The BBC asked the Trust if the Flash streaming service would fulfil its commitment to “platform neutrality”, but was told that a multi-platform service across downloads, streaming and cable was needed.” The interesting question is will the [...] Read more – ‘Beeb told iPlayer *must* be cross platform’.
Among the interesting news on using Flash (which I presume replaces RealPlayer) for streaming, and free content access on Cloud wifi hotspots, was this snippet: bq. “But Mr Highfield said the BBC had not committed to offering the iPlayer to Mac and Linux users who want to download and keep content on their machines for [...] Read more – ‘BBC almost gets there on iPlayer’.
I’m a huge fan of Matt Webb and Jack Schulze ; as I think everyone who’s ever had the luck to attend one of Matt’s talks becomes. I try and remember (now subscribed) to go and read their blog occasionally – always a rewarding way to spend the time it takes to consume a cup [...] Read more – ‘Matt Webb’s brilliant analysis of the ‘Zyoon’’.
…we might as well get good at it” Stewart Brand. China is cloud seeding on a massive scale – training and paying a distributed network of farmers to fire ex military munitions containing silver iodide to instigate rain cloud formation. Fascinating article – I’d no idea weather manipulation has been going on in many countries [...] Read more – ‘“We are as gods…’.
Wow. I got home this evening to find, amongst the mail, the ‘Architecture Pack’ a popup book by Ron van der Meer. I ordered it ta while ago (£15, second-hand!), but postal strikes etc delayed – I’d half forgotten I’d bought it – lovely suprise; compeltely energised me, even after a 4hr drive. It’s just [...] Read more – ‘Architecture popup book’.
I’m late to the dopplr party, but I’m liking the site a lot. It’s got the most most wonderful example of a written interface and spartan design that works well, loads fast (I presume) over a saturated Airport wifi (or Blackberry browser), and like all good software, is built on an interesting philosophy. I thought [...] Read more – ‘Dopplr…’.
Wonderful new ‘man (presume woman coming soon) on the street’ ads from Apple. They’re so perfect because: The iPhone is moving from early adopter to ‘smart mainstream’ – these ads are not for geeks (they already bought, hacked and so on). They’re unapolegitically about how the device helps normal people – none of the aspirational [...] Read more – ‘Very smart iPhone ads…’.
Great writeup of the interactive touch environment that MS is touting as a table unit for stores and public places. Some really clever stuff – check out the transparent sensors stuck on glass tiles (the first video on this page, that display video through the glass…very, very cool. Of course, touch screens have been around [...] Read more – ‘Microsoft Surface…’.
One Laptop Per Child — XO Giving: bq. “Starting November 12, One Laptop Per Child will be offering a Give 1 Get 1 Program for a brief window of time. For $399, you will be purchasing two XO laptops—one that will be sent to empower a child to learn in a developing nation, and one [...] Read more – ‘One Laptop Per Child (and one for me!)’.
There’s a lot of talk via TechMeme about the Guardian’s story ‘O2 wins Apple iPhone deal’. Everyone’s focusing on whether it will only come with EDGE, instead of 3G and that as well as 40% of call/data revenue (!) going back to Apple, Carphone Warehouse will be selling the devices. But that’s all traditional UK [...] Read more – ‘why is no one asking about *how* the iphone will be sold in the EU?’.
rodcorp: How we work is an ace collection of vignettes from successful (and therefore, famous) people about er, how they work. Interesting, and utterly bizzare how they’re hassled by random people wanting the email address of Mohammed Al Fayed (no, I don’t know either). Read more – ‘rodcorp: How (they) work’.
My pal Paul Farnell has written a great article on pricing web application. Very proud of him (and Dave and Matt) for getting Litmus, their web and email testing app out the door and making money – good stuff. Read more – ‘Pricing web apps…’.
And Microsoft hits back with a ‘top ten’ of why Google Apps is such a bad idea for enterprise… Couple of the points stood out amongst the (fairly poor) FUD: bq. “4. Google’s primary focus is on ad funded search. Their enterprise focus and now apps exist on the very fringe and in combination with [...] Read more – ‘Microsoft’s retort to Google Apps…’.
Microtrends . Cute idea. I like that phrase – I’m keeping an eye out for ‘small’ stuff, like, er, micropresentations. It may be that we’re all reinforcing our internet addled ADD tendencies, or maybe this is a (micro) trend toward efficiency? Read more – ‘Microtrends’.
The Guardian has the rejigged press release: bq. “Google has linked up with IT consultancy and outsourcing specialist CapGemini to target corporate customers with its range of desktop (er, web) applications, in the search engine’s most direct move against the dominance of Microsoft.” _UPDATE:_ there’s a great summary by Dan Farber, touching on issues of [...] Read more – ‘Google partners with Cap Gemini in corporate desktop push’.
Ok, so I spend oooh, all of 2 minutes and ‘outsourced’ this Participo’s search function to google (you can do this too). Pow – google search across the site.. I need to spend some time to refine the search results so they don’t include all of the non blog stuff on this server…but oh so [...] Read more – ‘by the power of google…’.
So, obviously along with the rest of the world, I’m salivating over the ipod touch. Two ideas/questions I have about it, that I haven’t been able to answer: *1) Would the iPod Touch make a good ‘ebook’ reader?* The pixel density is very high (it’s slightly higher than the iPhone at 163 pxels per inch)…the [...] Read more – ‘iPod Touch ideas/questions…’.
“Over the last 6 months, I have rarely watched regular TV, but did not have the patience to download programs, having found a wealth of timeless classics such as Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation [sic] available instantly, as a streamed video of ‘good enough’ quality.” This sounds like my viewing habits down to a tee… Smashing Telly [...] Read more – ‘Smashing Telly’.
Steven Poole, a writer and journalist (I suppose they are different activities, writes a wonderful post (article) Goodbye, cruel Word about how he uses WriteRoom, the wonderful ‘distraction free’ writing app that fills your screen with just your writing, and nothing else. Read more – ‘Steven Poole – Goodbye, cruel Word’.
Storm Worm Dwarfs World’s Top Supercomputers “”People aren’t respecting the threat this thing represents,” Baldwin said. “But when you pit it against the biggest military and government supercomputing resources, they’re like a speck on the back of a fly compared to the power that’s under the control of this one criminal group.” Another wonderful example [...] Read more – ‘sounds sensationalist…because it is?’.
Of all the commentary on the recent financial crisis, I’m finding the BBC’s Robert Peston’s analysis the clearest, least histrionic and well written. Stuff like this: “And here’s what should really turn the ECB red with shame. Just possibly it has needlessly bailed out the global hedge-fund industry.” “What worries me is that ECB and [...] Read more – ‘Great financial journalism’.
PG&E Ambient Energy Orb Now this is bloody interesting – a power company in the States has an incentive program to reduce usage during peak times (heard usage surges are big problem in the US). So, the orb glows red – customers in the thousands now have a glanceable view of energy load – and [...] Read more – ‘Ambient Orb used for glanceable energy load’.
Laughing Squid reviews the Drobo. PhilW, during a GeekUp email discussion, sent a link to Drobo this rather amazing desktop RAID that makes it dead simple to shove a bunch of old drives into a box and automatically configures itself to an optimised RAID… Much better than the collection of single hard drives daisy chained [...] Read more – ‘Hard disks done right…’.
New formats for conferences (Scripting News): bq. “Imagine an evening event where, at random, groups of six were put together in a room with food and drink, perhaps an inspiring view, and a topic to discuss. As with our evening confab, it would be off the record, just a discussion that might or might not [...] Read more – ‘New formats for conferences (Scripting News)’.
The Daily Telegraph’s overview of Phil Beadle’s brain workouts for kids: bq. “…(if) the child is old enough – try to get him to re-imagine it as a feminist or political tract. A feminist reading of Little Red Riding Hood might refer to the fact that it is poor Little Red, and not her absent [...] Read more – ‘Inspiration for young minds of every kind?’.
A Cell Phone for Baby Boomers Interesting phone design – I think I’d like these features to appear if I’m driving: “Instead of icons or menus, the phone presents features as a series of simple questions, which the user answers with the bold YES and NO buttons on the handset: Do you want to check [...] Read more – ‘Designing handsets for old people…’.
The Register has an interesting, but apparently incorrect, autopsy over the failure of iMode in Europe. It’s interesting, because the article states that the biggest reason for failure is cultural. Make sure you click the comments, because there is a really decent collection of comments that expands on the original articles premise. Like this one: [...] Read more – ‘i-Mode’s failure outside of Japan’.
Laws of Simplicity: bq. “ING Direct tells their customers that to determine how much of their money they should put into high-risk investments versus low-risk ones, just take your age up to 100 years old. However old you are, that is the percentage that you should invest in the low-risk stuff; then take the number [...] Read more – ‘simplicity…’.
An interesting experiment – 70 developers, caffeine, and a goal of launching a product in 48 hours. It failed, but they learnt: “You learn from failure and you get better.” It’s an interesting microcosm of the entire lifecycle of development…and some interesting lessons (which i still don’t heed all the time): 1) To make the [...] Read more – ‘startup weekend…’.
Psion: the last computer | The Register I’ve got a Psion 5 somewhere – and I remember my Dad with an early Psion and it’s dual line display, popping this hunk of metal and buttson out off it’s holder…I was pretty underwhelmed, as I recall (my geek tendencies developed later) But this is a fascinating [...] Read more – ‘The story of PsionPsion: the last computer | The Register’.
Every week brings a reminder about why paying my beeb licence fee makes me happy – here’s another… The BBC are experimenting with an adhoc, multi-channel reportage with Ben Hammersley, where he flows the incidentals, as well as the main reports through youtube, twitter, his blog, etc. He’s reporting on the challenges to secularism in [...] Read more – ‘BBC web news experiments’.
On the shipping container. No really, it’s a fable about modern business, geo-political links, the flattening of the world through commerce and the benefits of international standardisation. Read more – ‘Interesting looking book’.
I’ve been spending quite a bit of ‘blog time’ (that bit of the day when I kick back a bit and ought to go for a walk etc) reading Marc Andreesen’s blog. It’s an excellent, detailed and slightly sniffy look at financing, private equity, starting a business and anything thing else that catches the eye [...] Read more – ‘world views’.
I noticed that the latest n series mobiles from Nokia all have 3d barcode readers. Now Nokia have realised a simple web app that lets you create the 3d codes…Brilliant. Of course, these things have been around for ages, particularly in the far east, but if Nokia are pushing this, plus making content creation simple [...] Read more – ‘Nokia starting to push 3d barcodes?’.
Er, just watch this to have your thoughts and preconceptions about US military strategy, modern political geo-political management and um, cheesy PowerPoint animations challenged… Read more – ‘Dr Barnett requires 20 minutes of your time…’.
This week’s Economist looks ace – Juan Enriquez territory (gross simplification: a re-calibration of biological understanding heralds new dawn of bio-tech innovation). Read more – ‘Biology’s big bang’.
Great interview (direct link to popup RealPlayer stream) with Damien Hirst about his latest speculative business/art venture. He seems to have turned into quite the Warhol, artist-as-entrepeneur (100 person team, etc. etc.) I never really got Warhol’s work, until I saw a series of electric chair photos silkscreened onto purples canvasses, likewise with Hirst. I [...] Read more – ‘For the love of God’.
Having just finished organising the micropresentation session at Reboot, and experiencing some incredible ideas, compressed into 20 slides and 15 second explanations, I’m completely obsessed with short-form content. The webby awards, have a 5 word limit on their speeches – used to profound effect by the BBC News team, reminding everyone that Alan Johnston is [...] Read more – ‘micro-speeches’.
Slides and basically, his talk in notes ‘People are Products too’. Apart from the micro-presentations, this was the only full talk I caught at Reboot, but what a talk! If you saw this talk (especially if you saw the talk), it’s worth looking at this again. It’s great revisiting these slides and the narrative, as [...] Read more – ‘Matt Webb presentation ‘Products are People too’’.
BBC NEWS | Programmes | File on 4 | Carbon trade scheme ‘is failing’ Why doesn’t this surprise me: bq. “The EU’s Emission Trading Scheme – a key part of the UK Government’s drive to combat climate change – began in 2005 and created a trade in carbon allowances. It is essentially a permit to [...] Read more – ‘Carbon trade scheme ‘is failing’’.
The Profit Calculator — New York Magazine – ace set of short articles outlining the business fundamentals of businesses ranging from yoga studios to investment banks. Most profitable business by percentage margins? Drug dealing. Mind you the guy ended up in jail. (Via Kottke.) Read more – ‘The business of New York’.
BBC NEWS | Business | Flybe to reveal damage of flights: – Be Airways is going to label details of the co2 footprints of their flights, and offset the emissions through a ‘carbon neutral’ charity. As Peter sad when I mentioned carbon neutralising flights “it’s like digging a hole and filing i back up again” [...] Read more – ‘labelling flight emissions…’.
Nicole Simon interviewed me yesterday for a podcast, where we talked ostensibly about the upcoming micro-presentations session I’m compering at Reboot next week. Apart from the unnerving sound of me umming and ahhing my through some unplanned ideas (I’d had a looong day), we talked about a few different ideas (bad software tools, the ‘fetishisation’ [...] Read more – ‘me, speaking about micro-presentations…’.
A news item on the OLPC project, with extensive (well, for US news) interviews with Negroponte, and footage of the devices in situ. I’m still in lobe with this project, it warms the cockles of me ‘art to see these kids teaching eachother and learning through constructionism. Read more – ‘One laptop per child video..’.
In Palermo, Life Vibrates in a Fading Market – New York Times lovely, evocative article of life in Italy…I had an engadget tab open at the same time…the latest mobile devices seem so banal in comparison to this timeless, real existence, don’t they? Read more – ‘In Palermo, Life Vibrates in a Fading Market’.
I posted about a month ago about Twitter/Jaiku – ruminating about the first hostage or other type of mass-interest event where a person intimately involved starts broadcasting messages out. I think this will represent a second tipping point for the service, in terms of mass media interest/awareness. I guess the idea I was fumbling around [...] Read more – ‘Why Twitter matters (just to you)’.
A good article (and, usefully, a re’print’ from the less accessible media section) about the Beeb and it’s inordinate delays and balls-ups with the iPlayer, which underlines an increasing lack of leadership in the digital space. God, I hope this doesn’t pan out – the beeb’s technology depts. used to have some very cool people [...] Read more – ‘Is the BBC screwing up it’s technology leadership?’.
BBC news on MIT’s coding tool for kids offers ‘easy’ coding I love the programming stuff like Squeak, and now Scratch, which clearly follows another MIT conceptual innovationSeymour Papert’s Constructionist concepts (massive summarisation: learning by making stuff). A lovely quote from the story: “A program doesn’t congratulate you for the 90% that you got right. [...] Read more – ‘MIT’s new free tool offers ‘easy’ coding’.
Guardian Unlimited – the new look explained from Guardian Unlimited I’ve never really got into the Guardian’s online presence (although I _love_ their redesigned newspaper format), but they’ve just launched a massively re-engineered page design. I’ve waited for this for a while…they’d really got their design chops on with Comment Is Free, and I can [...] Read more – ‘Guardian Unlimited’s new look.’.
The BBC (and Guardian) are hosting a multi-page, printable Gilbert & George work for the next 48 hrs. Fab – I love Gilbert & George – there was an amazing retrospective of their work in the Tate Modern…and it was amazing to see their development over the last 40 years. It was everything art should [...] Read more – ‘here’s one they made earlier’.
Evan’s Newsvine profile is a something to behold – he wouldn’t be vulgar enough to link to it from here, but as his Participo co-author, I will (without his knowledge :-). Evan and I both started using NewsVine, the ‘community news’ site when it launched, and while I just read and occasionally seeded a story, [...] Read more – ‘sheep.newsvine.com’.
Google Analytics, rev 2, the bastard child of MeasureMap and Urchin. I was really impressed with MeasureMap back in late 2005, and I recently dusted off my account to track traffic for ThinkFold, but it had clearly been neglected (although it still worked. I also run Google Analytics (a dusted off Urchin), for my sites, [...] Read more – ‘Google analytics rev 2’.
Take Your PowerPoint And… is a brief writeup of the unconference (wikipedia link), an idea that’s based in a collective allergic reaction to the pricy, structured, advertorial conference. My first introduction to the concept of ‘unconference’ was via Dave Winer’s blog. In short, it’s about participation – having just come back from Mix07, where, for [...] Read more – ‘Take Your PowerPoint And shove it…’.
Why the BBC Trust’s decision on iPlayer sells us all short outlines the failure of the BBC Trust to listen to public opinion and it’s desire to restrict DRM content through it’s iPlayer. I love the BBC, it’s something I’m really proud of; it’s public service broadcast remit and innovation in internet content (e.g. podcasts) [...] Read more – ‘Public good turns into public bad from the BBC’.
Hey, i got an nice email from one of the Metacritic guys re. my comparison with Rotten Tomatoes…one thing that I really think Metacritic should do, is a decent mobile optimised version – at the moment, their offering is Vindigo and Avantgo, neither of which I have used for years. Anyway, I mocked up a [...] Read more – ‘Mobile metacritic?’.
I’m a huge fan of MetaCritic, and I was really bored sometime back last year (I think I was waiting for my car to be serviced), so I thought I’d compare the site with it’s rival, Rotten Tomatoes. for some reason, I’ve left this on my desktop for, er, several months – anyway, if you’re [...] Read more – ‘Comparing film review sites…’.
I’ve been using this week – really interesting ‘short-form’ blogging service…(mine’s at http://participo.tumblr.com/) Apart from the very easy/pleasant interface, the medium definitely affords a more spontaneous, less ‘aggh, I’ve got to write something long and meaningful’ type interaction with blogging… It’s had a really interesting affect on me – almost a sense of relief(!) that [...] Read more – ‘Tumblr – short form blogging…’.
I started writing this on Monday and left it in draft form…given recent events, it seems a bit eerily prescient…(I would be surprised if the scenario below hasn’t happened during the Virginia Tech shootings) I had a not particularly nice thought the other day – imagine a Twitter or Jaiku user finds themselves in a [...] Read more – ‘future Twitter/Jaiku tipping point…’.
Google desktop is excellent (I tell clients to install it and crawl their shared drives as a quick knowledge management ‘upgrade’). The Mac client released last week – it’s great. Feels faster than Spotlight, I like the bezel. Really like the blended list of results in Google style browser window Actually, I’ve just uninstalled it [...] Read more – ‘Google Desktop on the Mac’.
TED’s redesigned their website. Quite simply, incredible. I love their new design, where they’ve grouped their talks around key themes (I presume taken from the conferences) such as ‘The Power of Cities’, ‘How the Mind works’ and ‘Is there a God?’ Fabulous stuff…the flash-based design is excellent…criteria-based clusters of talks, based on selectable views (topic, [...] Read more – ‘TED – grab your brain and 45 minutes…’.
This is brilliant…PopTech has started to release videos of it’s fantastic talks online (and of course, a podcast feed :-). I’ve listened to loads of talks from Poptech in the past, courtesy of IT Conversations, it’ll be great to see the actual presentations as well. It’s like pudding, after a nourishing maincourse of Ted Talks! [...] Read more – ‘Waaahey – PopTech videos online’.
Clear’s Privacy Policy is superb – they’ve got wiki-like markup showing the changes they’ve made. Great example of information transparency. By the way, my new venture, WordPress.com shared their own Privacy Policy under a Creative Commons licence. I’ve done the same with a ‘UKised’ derived policy for a new venture, a collaborative outliner, ThinkFold (I’ll [...] Read more – ‘Great Privacy Policy..’.
Skim is a excellent PDF reader for the Mac. I love PDF, I read stacks of documents via PDF, I print a lot of stuff to PDF and try to print to paper to read/review documents. However, I loathe the bloated Adobe Reader, and until now used Apple’s Preview (which is fast and lightweight). But [...] Read more – ‘*amazing* PDF reader for the Mac’.
You Do Like Reading Off a Computer Screen. Nice riff on why the technology of paper books isn’t doomed… I agree, but there’s a stronger element to his argument about thin sliced content in general, particularly for computer and handheld devices. Long form content, i.e. the novel, suits a book format, because the medium itself [...] Read more – ‘Cory Doctorow: You Do Like Reading Off a Computer Screen’.
Eco-Geekery : Blog Archive : Bruce Sterling closing remarks at SXSW 2007 A good set of notes on Bruce Sterling’s SXSW ‘rant’ – another classic, brilliant Sterling polemic on social networks, the near future and ultimately, optimism. The notes are pretty a near transcription…a good resource for me, as I listen mainly whilst driving, and [...] Read more – ‘Bruce Sterling closing remarks at SXSW 2007’.
-Er, I’ve lost my phone…mail me (I’m checking it a lot) and I’ll call you back from my top secret (i.e. I don’t know what it is) telephone I have here…- Update: Phone replaced, and by the power of isync, back on track… Of course, I found my old phone as soon as I got [...] Read more – ‘Back from France (but still) without a mobile…’.
I have a couple of personal heroes, and one of them is Stewart Brand. There’s a great NYTimes article on Brand’s views on nuclear power, and how it’s the saviour of the ideals of the ecological movement, which linked to a couple more articles, one of which had this fucking excellent ‘Brandism: bq. “I would [...] Read more – ‘Stewart Brand’.
The HBR List: Breakthrough Ideas for 2007 is a pretty decent write up from various ‘luminaries’ of their emergent thinking for trends and big ideas… A meatier, far more varied, and even more of a timesink is Edge’s ‘what are you optimistic about?’ annual question (and of course, responses) from a collection of scientists, artists [...] Read more – ‘Breakthrough Ideas for 2007’.
Many Eyes is an IBM sponsored(?) site with loads of visualisation examples; took a cursory look, seems pretty varied and interesting (not quite Tufte, though, although I don’t thin that’s the point :-) (Via O’Reilly Radar.) Read more – ‘Many Eyes – data visualisation gallery..’.
fascinating text analysis comparing keynotes… Simplicity and on-message – basic stuff, but so hard to get right. A nice addendum to that would be to compare blog mentions/column inches referring to the respective keynotes. Read more – ‘Bill Gates and Steve Jobs: Keynote text analysis’.
Fantastic New Yorker article by Macolm Gladwell about the differences between mysteries and puzzles (gross simplification: mysteries have no known outcome, puzzles do) that examines the Enron scandal (gross simplification: Enron didn’t obsfucate facts, no-one knew or wanted to look at them) Watergate and the Allied intelligence efforts to uncover the secret V1 rocket. Gladwell [...] Read more – ‘mysteries vs. puzzles’.
The Hipporoller – ingenious water roller My client just sent me this link as an ‘example of a simple idea having a profound affect on people’s lives’. A rolling water container – fantastic, beautifully, beautifully simple idea… Read more – ‘The Hipporoller – ingenious water roller’.
Andrew McAfee’s article on the barriers to adoption of new technologies/tools is superb, and jarringly prescient: “The 9X problem goes a long way to explaining the tech industry folk wisdom that to spread like wildfire a new product has to offer a tenfold improvement over what’s currently out there.” Basically, the newnew thing has to [...] Read more – ‘the 9x as good problem..’.
Prediction Markets at confab.yahoo Good, high-level (exec summary?) write-up of a set of talks about Prediction Markets. I like the low-complexity example of using a prediction market to suss out a release date: “Todd Proebsting of Microsoft, in his case study, described a market he created to predict the validity of the testing schedule for [...] Read more – ‘Prediction Markets at confab.yahoo’.
Craigslist Meets the Capitalistshas done the rounds, but it’s a nice heart warming antidote this Christmas, about a company that exists, well, for the sake of existing and spurns the usual profit maximising route…. So, as the not-really-for-profit craigslist chief explains why they do what they do, to confused Wall Street types… “…the $10 fee [...] Read more – ‘Craigslist Meets the Capitalists’.
fantastic write up of Apple’s failure to manage the Newton successfully. I remember lusting after an Apple Newton. And finally, a few years ago, I got one (my mate Phil gave me one of his 8 or so newtons :-) They were years ahead of their time, but Apple managed to balls up the product: [...] Read more – ‘lessons learned from Apple’s Newton mistakes’.
I think 3′s x-series price plans were anounced today. I’ve been really interested to see where 3 priced their ‘unlimited’ consumer internet access package, which bundled Skype (only to other Skype users), Orb (for PC media file access), Sling (for live TV streaming) and the less revolutionary Messenger and eBay, as well as unwalled, real [...] Read more – ‘3′s x-series UK prices announced…’.
I love the One Laptop Per Child project, it’s a brilliant initiative. I’ve banged on about it before, but was just reading this NYTimes article that made me splutter tea over my keyboard… Of course, the project is laudable, but there are so many lessons from this project for driving and shaping the _mentality_ of [...] Read more – ‘the ($150) laptop’.
I’m not sure if I’ve pointed to Jan Chipchase’s blog before, but it’s brilliant. He’s run ethnography research projects for Nokia, and has a _really_ cool job, going to places all over the world to observe mobile phone culture and usage patterns. He documents all of this with really interesting shots of mobile phone charge [...] Read more – ‘Mobile TV observations…’.
Last year, the New Yorker did something pretty cool – they sold a complete searchable and browse-able archive of their back issues on DVD. I bought it as an xmas present for my brother (obviously taking a sneak peek myself :-) It’s a great way to view the whole design history, the articles and is [...] Read more – ‘Entire New Yorker’s back issues on Hard Drive’.
The Windows Shutdown crapfest outlines, in some detail, the ridiculous bureaucracy involved in building Vista, and in particular, the teams that intersected to build the power off feature I mentioned last week. Amongst other nuggets, was this quote that kind of sums up the antithesis to keeping things simple: bq. “The end result of all [...] Read more – ‘24 people to build the new Vista shutdown feature…’.
Normally I get a sense of anxiety when _starting_ Windows, but Joel on Softwareperfectly illustrates how a plethora of options to shut down Windows Vista can cause anxiety because of a Paradox of Choice . Reducing options is a profound mantra for 37Signals as well – and it’s something I’m trying to stick with… And [...] Read more – ‘the anxiety of shutting down Windows’.
So, I saw ‘The Prestige’ last night. It’s an excellent movie, one that swaps heroes, makes a sense of non-connection from the main characters into a key plot element, and bravely makes it’s lead actors pretty unlikeable. Any, I was most struck by David Bowie’s portrayal of Nikola Tesla. The acting was ‘ok’, but his [...] Read more – ‘David Bowie and Ricky Gervais…’.
I recently tried to log into macroadobewhatever.com, the first time I accessed my freebie Macromedia Developer account since they were bought by Adobe. I used my *correct* macromedia password, but because at some point in 1999 I registered at adobe as well, they want to qualify that login as well… If one of the bloody [...] Read more – ‘my first taste of adobe’s purchase of macromedia…’.
Another classic (and short!)Joel on Software essay: “Listen. Let me tell you a secret about management consulting companies and software organizations.” Oh, so, so true…apply his story against pretty much any business optimisation area of the standard body shop bollocks consultancies, and this rings so, so true. Read more – ‘the secrets of successful consultants…’.
Just found this link ( IDEO’s Urban Pre-Planning | Metropolis Magazine) in my ‘todo’ blog list – it’s an interesting article about IDEO and their ‘value-add’, angle-free consulting approach: “Williams puts it another way: “They don’t have a dog in the fight.” Unlike most urban planners (a term IDEO resists), not only does IDEO avoid [...] Read more – ‘another example of non-partisan consultancy…IDEO%u2019s Urban Pre-Planning | Metropolis Magazine’.
Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: Welcome back to frugal computing is a fascinating article on the paradox of computing abundance…it squares nicely with this article profiling Jeff Bezos’s conversation with Tim O’Reilly: “Bezos explained that the biggest cost for Amazon is not power, servers or people maintaining data centers, but utilization. “Because we are high [...] Read more – ‘‘frugal’ computing’.
Excellent info-graphic from NYTimes showing the flightpath of the plane that hit the Manhattan residential building. Obviously an awful accident, superbly explained in visual builds. (Via 37 Signals.) Read more – ‘NY Times infographic’.
RED HERRING article on Lotus Notes doing the RSS shuffle: “…Technologies such as blogs, RSS feeds, and portable storage devices are changing the way businesses collaborate, said IBM Lotus general manager Michael Rhodin in a statement. We are helping organizations take advantage of new industry trends to share ideas and reach new markets…” Yup, you [...] Read more – ‘RED HERRING | Lotus Notes Goes Web 2.0’.
_(I wrote this a week and a half ago…)_ I don’t think I’ve written a film review before (or been particularly compelled to do so), but I’ve cracked open the laptop and I’m writing this on a huge Virgin Atlantic Boeing 747 over the mid-atlantic en route to Havana, travelling at 556 miles per hour [...] Read more – ‘An Inconvenient Truth…’.
…I’m back. Shattered, and just getting my head around my inbox, back-ordered blogs and to-do lists. Havana and Cuba generally, is predictably, incredible – and quite humbling – there’s a basic level of _survival_ going on in the streets, which makes the stuff I worry about on a daily basis here on Participo quite trivialising. [...] Read more – ‘your man in Havana’.
Cryptography | The non-denial of the non-self | Economist.com – er, I think I understand the principles behind this, although it’s far better to read the article than for me to try and bumble an explanation… Read more – ‘Using philosophy to make databases secure…’.
A quick glimpse in the future now – genetically modified cats, bred to be hypo-allergenic. I’m belatedly reading Juan Enriquez’s brilliant book on genetics, about companies of the future will capitalise on their ability to read, and manage the ‘code’ of the 21st Century, so I’m fully prepared to see news like this…is it a [...] Read more – ‘Genetically modified cats’.
IGN: Wii Channel Breakdown “An example of a channel is the Disk Drive Channel, which shows what’s currently in the Wii disk drive, be it a Wii game or a GameCube game. You’ll also find a picture channel, which gives you access to the pictures located on your system, and a news channel, which uses [...] Read more – ‘Nintendo Wii Channels…’.
BBC NEWS | Technology | Mobile web shake-up gets started. I just don’t see the benefit of a .mobi extension. Surely this is utterly pointless – just detect the user string of the client browser and serve the appropriate page…. Mobile versions yes, but not hanging of another domain…it’s not even a decent 4 letter [...] Read more – ‘.mobi launched…yaaawn’.
Attensa is free. Fantastic. Attensa’s a pretty robust Outlook plugin to read RSS. I’ve been installing the trail on some client desktops (it’s been installing where Newsgator hasn’t). But now it’s free, the RSS flow from the wiki/blog ecosystem I’ve built can be plugged in by all their project teams with no worry about cost. [...] Read more – ‘Enterprise RSS Feed Servers and RSS Readers – Attensa – Download’.
It’s one of those press releaes from CLO, but it’s a interesting, completely solvable problem – why don’t organisations ask their staff advice? Here’s some facts from the release: The less education an employee has, the less likely he or she will be asked to contribute an idea. Forty percent of those with just high [...] Read more – ‘1/3rd of employees never asked their advice’.
This is a great reminder of why I’m modelling Participo’s business approach and client ‘solutions’ on the advertising/marketing business – the following paragraph of the Wall Street Journal article: “…Naked’s premise is simple: If you go to a coal company looking for an energy supply, you’ll get coal as the recommended solution. It’s the same [...] Read more – ‘Ask a coal company for energy ideas…’.
I can’t decided whether the term ‘crowdsourcing‘ is utterly brilliant or vulgar – but no matter, the core ideas that underpin it are excellent – distribute small tasks (evaluation, processing, etc.) to a large group and aggregate the results. A great introduction to a variance on this theme (group decisions trumping experts) is Surowiecki’s Wisdom [...] Read more – ‘Interesting podcast on ‘crowdsourcing’’.
Rolling Stone has a jaw-dropping article on the way voting machines have been recklessly deployed in the US elections. To be frank, if this is even half true, it reeks of a James Ellroy stlye plot, at the highest levels, to fix national elections: * “…the president of Diebold’s election unit, Bob Urosevich…was personally distributing [...] Read more – ‘Can someone please explain to me how this is allowed to happen?’.
BBC NEWS | Business | State sues car firms on climate “The state of California is suing six carmakers for costs associated with their cars’ greenhouse gas emissions.” Wow – go Arnie! I wonder whether this will drive (excuse the pun) a risk profile for current company activities to green their product range – add [...] Read more – ‘BBC NEWS | Business | State sues car firms on climate’.
Fulfillment by Amazon has finally arrived – where Amazon do the whole warehousing, fulfillment, customer service/returns and sales bit for your product(s)… They’d been doing this for some large-scale ‘partner’ companies (Toys ‘r’ us, not sure who else), but now they’ve rolled it out to well, pretty much anyone. So, prototype ideas in CAD, get [...] Read more – ‘Amazon takes the final step’.
Availabot (Schulze & Webb) is a fab idea – one of those collapsible toys, but it’s wired to an IM client and pops up/collapses based on the presence of an IM contact. It’s great glanceable technology. My mate Paul mentioned it – it’s a (pre-production) product produced by Matt Webb, whose talks we’ve listened to [...] Read more – ‘Availabot’.
Roasted Wasabi Hot Green Peas were just featured on Mr Winer’s site…reminded me that I had a teacup (!) of these on Sunday in a pub just off Charing Cross road…a good accompaniment to my pints of Black Budweiser…yummy :-) Read more – ‘Roasted Wasabi Hot Green Peas’.
BBC news mentions that Sainsbury’s is (finally) going to use ‘compostible’ packaging for some of it’s products…why not all of them? Still, it’s a good move – the sheer amount of packaging I accumulate in a week or so is ridiculous, particularly for fruit and vegetables which I immediately discard the packaging. Looks like Ross [...] Read more – ‘Sainsbury’s packages in green…’.
I watched a TED video of a talk by Ross Lovegrove a few weeks back, and I keep thinking about it… This is a guy almost _overwhelmed_ about his singular vision he holds for the design of objects using bio-polymers and organic, natural forms (I can’t possibly do it justice, go see the video :-). [...] Read more – ‘Ross Lovegrove talk…’.
TED Blog: Pit-stop for doctors is a great little article about how surgeons studied ferrari’s pit-stop team for ideas about how to become more efficient when performing surgery. It’s a brilliant idea – the _ballet_ of the pit stop team is superbly analogous to a surgical team… and it’s such a simple idea (like all [...] Read more – ‘cross-pollination…’.
Microsoft Invites the World to Create Its Own Xbox 360 Console Games I think this, and the general opening up of the platform to ‘hobbyist’ developers (that’s some hobby!) might produce some really innovative games. The 360′s download platform for ‘simple games’, is maybe the first area we’ll see interesting stuff emerge? Read more – ‘Create your Own Xbox 360 Game’.
2006LMS results shows well, LMS survey results from Learning circuits. Just seen this, so not had time to fully digest – but looks like satisfaction with LMS’s is seriously declining, and orgs are still using them as a command and control model of ‘learning’… Read more – ‘LMS survey results…’.
Sharesleuth is a genius idea from Mark Cuban (he talks about it in detail here). Basically, Cuban has employed a couple of biz journalists to investigate, in depth, some spurious company. Cuban then decides whether to short the stock, and then publishes the whole story on Sharesleuth, all the while pointing out his short position. [...] Read more – ‘fascinating stock shorting idea…’.
ok, not really (not yet, anyhow :-) But my dream of buggering off to Tuscany and working via broadband gets a little bit closer. iChat’s new video presentation facility looks amazing…so, buy client’s a mac mini…set it up and see them physically in six months, while all the while working with them remotely through ichat.. [...] Read more – ‘that’s it – I’m moving to Tuscany…’.
Nicholas Negroponte on TED Talks. Ok, so he’s a little arrogant, but I like him – I like his attitude, his vision, and he’s got the self-belief in the creation of the $100 laptop that will get it done. He was a little tetchy – understandable, I think, based on the timing of the talk, [...] Read more – ‘Nicholas Negroponte riffing on the $100 laptop’.
I read about the Tesla in Wired – 0-60mph in 4 seconds, Lotus design AND most importantly, it’s all electric…fuck yeah! My Prius feels, well, so _carbon_ So, if this is all electric, I’m sure I’m not the first to think this – what if the cars had the roof covered in photovoltaic cells? Wonder [...] Read more – ‘Tesla – the electric car that does’.
Interesting, if a little lightweightwrite up of Magnum in Motion, the beautiful interactive photo essays that are also available as podcasts. Although it’s a fluff piece mentioning Apple kit, it’s a nice (but frustratingly brief) insight into the production process that Magnum uses to produce the essays. I’d have loved to see some photos of [...] Read more – ‘Magnum in Motion’.
NOSE is trailing (as is Downes) the BlackBoard LMS patent malarky., in some depth. They’re obviously heavily biased (quite rightly) against BlackBoard. The proff in their pudding is if BlackBoard start going after ‘infringers’ Read more – ‘tracking BlackBoard’s LMS ‘patent’’.
Fascinating segment on Newsnight at the moment looking at Cuba’s health system (oh, Canada has the best healthcare :-) Interesting, because arguably the US embargo has had a bunch of unintended consequences: * Preventation rather than cure: Because funds are so tight, the pragmatic approach to medicinal care is _preventative_ medicinal care, not reactive. * [...] Read more – ‘Cuba has (2nd) best healthcare system in the world…’.
Four countries commit to 4 million Linux-powered OLPC laptops: “A spokesperson for the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program revealed July 31 that the countries of Nigeria, Brazil, Argentina, and Thailand have each committed to buy 1 million Linux laptops through the U.S.-based program…” Excellent news. India apparently pulled out of ordering the laptops, as [...] Read more – ‘Four countries commit to 4 million OLPC laptops’.
e-Literate: Blackboard Patents the LMS: “… As I read it, Blackboard basically owns the patent on any sort of groupware at all that is used for teaching purposes. This could have very serious consequences for both proprietary and Open Source competitors…” Er, I’m no lawyer…if this is as bad as it seems, what on earth [...] Read more – ‘Appartantly Blackboard patented the LMS concept…?’.
MSFT Financial Analyst Meeting: Ray Ozzie: “The world is evolving into a highly networked form in which the barriers to participation in almost everything we do are crumbling down%u2014the barriers to sharing, the barriers to contributing and learning, the barriers to working together. As more participants come online, platforms and marketplaces will serve to make [...] Read more – ‘Ray Ozzie outlines MS’s services strategy…’.
Why (Most) Training is Useless is a great article on the failure of (most) training (hint: it’s done at the wrong time, for the wrong reasons :-) by way of Jay Cross _(UPDATE):_ I just thought it would be worth re-reading Sam Adkins ‘we’re selling snake oil’ article as an addendum :-) Read more – ‘David Maister > Articles > Why (Most) Training is Useless’.
Flow is a lovely ‘game’ – read about in Wired. Well. it’s more a form of mouse-based yoga…very relaxing, lovely physics. Read more – ‘Welcome to Flow in Games’.
Great point by Jason Fried on the difference between _writing_ words and word _processing_ . It’s basically a defence of their pared down collaborative writing tool (I’ve used it as part of Basecamp it’s pretty nice). It’s an important point – when I get back to a client’s office next week, I’ll be pushing an [...] Read more – ‘37Signals on writing vs. word processing…’.
I’ve watched, with increasing interest, the effect of the ‘SOX’ regulations on a particular software team at a client. They’ve built in information capture and re-routing in every employee ‘transaction’ within their software system. I’m pretty sure all communications has to be archived for SOX compliance (I’m on a train, so can’t check this out). [...] Read more – ‘Sarbannes Oxley and the potential for organisational memory?’.
By way of Kottke, is a great short essay by Brian Eno on the Long Now (actually it’s about the connected idea of ‘big here’). I’ve got Stewart Brand’s book on the Long Now clock project (possible holiday read…) – I’m really trying to live this idea for long-term planning. At the moment, I can [...] Read more – ‘excellent Brian Eno essay on the ‘Long Now’’.
BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Space images show UK sweltering – amazing satellite images showing air pollution. Maybe these sorts of images will drive home the rapidly deteriorating environmental problems we face (mind you, being in London last week, the problem is fairly obvious on the ground…:-) Read more – ‘Space images show UK sweltering’.
“Brands take new ideas underground” is a BBC news article on ‘micro events’ by T-Mobile. Now, whether sticking 300 people and a cool band in a small venue buys t-mobile any credibility is debatable, but I think it’s interesting to see the acceptance of tiny events by their marketing team, and there’s obviously an expectation [...] Read more – ‘the impact of micro events’.
A Search Engine That’s Becoming an Inventor – New York Times: Great article about Google building their tech infrastructure: “Mr. Page designed the initial Google servers, with the assumption that parts would fail on a regular basis. At first he tried to simplify assembly — and reduce the presumed repair time — by not fastening [...] Read more – ‘Google…powered by Velcro’.
Interesting (year old) interview with Bill Gates and Ray Ozzie about how to ‘escape email hell’ I’m clearing through my drafts folder in MarsEdit and publishing the half finished articles if they’re still interesting… I think this one is. Email’s becoming a real bugbear in organisations – so many people are spending hours a day [...] Read more – ‘Gates and Ozzie: How to Escape E-Mail Hell’.
Lovely New York Times article on the Rockwell designing the interaction space of an airport terminal through collaboration with a choreographer. It’s really interesting to look at public spaces and try and work out how the ‘traffic flow’ has been designed. I did this everywhere I walked in Manchester yesterday, but I’m buggered if I [...] Read more – ‘At the New JetBlue Terminal, Passengers May Pirouette to Gate 3’.
An Open University project that uses Flash (running on Cold Fusion?) to manage realtime, multi-person video conferences. Obviously there’s a bunch of these type of applications, including the really excellent Breeze. But what sets this apart is it’s timeline interface…it really makes for an interesting retrospective experience – far more ‘hyperlinky’ than a bog standard [...] Read more – ‘Interesting flash meeting app’.
A list of the top 13 (why not a classic top 10?) outsource training providers… I just don’t see anything exciting here here, just big companies who’ve grown their ‘innovation capability’ by acquisition. This industry is ripe for disruptive players. How will SumTotal react to their own customer installing a wiki and seeing their customers [...] Read more – ‘State of the training industry?’.
# Rocketing oil prices in reaction to Israeli attacks on Lebanon… # The UK’s first corn-based bottle of water More inextricably linked than initially apparant? Read more – ‘Two pages open in my web browser….’.
I linked to the TED talks a week or so ago…I finally got around to watching Hans Rosling’s talk showing some extraordinarily powerful data visualisations of stats of fertility rates vs. GDP. It’s incredibile – some of the most compelling ways to tell real stories with data in an engaging way. I followed the link [...] Read more – ‘Extraordinary visualisations…’.
I’m just writing some stuff up for a client – I just had a really obvious thought…most of the e-learning courseware I’ve seen, on the whole, completely ignores the philosophical concept of the hyperlink. That’s nuts, quite frankly. The core technical and philosophical element of the web is replaced by a controlled, linear structure imposed [...] Read more – ‘e-learning ignores the hyperlink?’.
Cool – audio _and_ video from the latest TED conference are onlinehere. This is brilliant…downloading Al Gore’s session right now…I heard it’s pretty special… Even cooler – there’s a podcast feed too. Real kudos to TED…obviously being there is the real point, but this opens up the ideas and so on to a less connected [...] Read more – ‘TEDTalks (audio, video)’.
I’ve just taken a quick look at some Windows Vista screencasts. One thing that really caught my eye was the ‘Guided Help’ – an automated (or prompted) macro-type function that shows you how to perform certain tasks and configurations. It basically takes over the mouse cursor, highlighting the button presses etc. Of course, this stuff [...] Read more – ‘Windows Vista – Guided Help’.
BBC NEWS | Most Popular Now | Live World Map is a realtime, flash driven ranking of the most popular news items at the moment. It’s excellent – you can drill down to see what different regions are looking (pictures seem popular with the Americas :-) and there’s some historical views as well. This will [...] Read more – ‘BBC News – live popularity rating news map’.
An extraordinary and powerful set of ads for Amnesty International that use ‘transparent’ framing. Kind of reminds me of another campaign that used an entire side of a lorry. An image of a set of photorealistic palettes was striped across a load of pivoted cubes. When the lorry was moving the pivoted cubes would roll [...] Read more – ‘Amnesty International Ads’.
Field tested books: “The Field-Tested Books project is our version of the Heisenberg principle: reading a certain book in a certain place uniquely affects a person’s experience with both. The writing you’ll find here is grounded in that idea. You won’t find any book reviews here. You’ll find reviews of experience.” A lovely idea and [...] Read more – ‘Coudal Partners ‘field tested books’’.
mySociety: “Using colours and contour lines they show how long it takes to travel between one particular place and every other place in the area, using public transport.” Wow. Excellent use of heatmapping…I’ll plan my next journey by this…although I’m sure the social implications of these maps is more to the point. (Via Ben Griffiths.) Read more – ‘Transport heatmaps for the UK’.
Beautiful – Douglas Adams on how to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet: “I suppose earlier generations had to sit through all this huffing and puffing with the invention of television, the phone, cinema, radio, the car, the bicycle, printing, the wheel and so on, but you would think we would learn the [...] Read more – ‘Douglas Adams…’.
Semapedia.org – The Physical Wikipedia is an unbelievably cool idea. Basically, you see a 3D barcode, use some software installed on your phone to take it’s image and you access the wikipedia page for that building/object/sculpture/whatever. See it in action here. It’s a great idea – I’ve seen this ‘augmented reality’ idea done elsewhere, with [...] Read more – ‘Semapedia.org – The Physical Wikipedia’.
A guy called Pete Barr-Wilson has a photoset on Flickr of working prototypes of the $100 laptop, also known as the OLPC (one laptop per child). It’s a great idea, and the actual units are inspired. I’d personally love to get hold of one, and there’s a pledge to get the project to sell them [...] Read more – ‘working prototypes of the $100 laptop…’.
A pal invited me to his Skypecast – a CB Radio style free for all, with some fascinating potential. Basically, it’s a audio chat room/teleconference, initiated by one person (who has some rudimentary controls) and open to all. A quick run-through show the usual geek tests, but also coaching, education and other social, business and [...] Read more – ‘Skypecasts’.
Interactive Architecture dot Org is a blog I’ve just come across, that documents interactive environments. i think designed interactions with physical space is a fascinating area. It’s probably why I’m _so_ looking forward to the Wii Read more – ‘Interactive Architecture’.
I don’t think I’ve written about Pecha Kucha before. I came across it from a presentation uploaded by Jan Chipchase, a Nokia ethnographer (beautiful blog, btw) who had done a presentation in Tokyo. The presentation format is deliberately simple and constrained – 20 slides, 20 seconds each. On anything you like. Adopted as the cool [...] Read more – ‘Pecha Kucha’.
For Tiny Screens, Some Big Dreams – New York Times is a reasonable overview of the mobile entertainment ‘ space’. Interesting, because it’s clear there’s a design pattern that’s emerging – simple games, 5 minute ‘catchup’s’ of TV shows, a few minutes of comedy, and: ” Wide-angle shots are to be avoided, while slow-motion clips [...] Read more – ‘Casual content…’.
The 1 Second Film is a great concept…basically they flog $1 (or more) producer credits (on imdb, no less) and create a 1 second movie, with 90 minutes of credits, accompanied by a documentary. It’s an absurd, brilliant idea…with buttonholed celebrities donating…it’s great to see a really original concept do well…reminiscent, I suppose of milliondollarhomepage [...] Read more – ‘The 1 Second Film’.
Free calls to all landlines and mobile phones within the US and Canada – Skype Blogs Blimey – now if they could just do that in the UK/Europe, I’d be even happier :-) This must kill the VoIP players like Vonage and scare the regular telcos over there…landlines not such a big deal, but free [...] Read more – ‘Skype adds another cat to the pigeons’.
Unstoppable Force or Unnecessary Click Factory? is an excellent look into the inefficient page design of MySpace and the pageviews the inefficiency creates. Apart from the odd metrics, there’s the interesting dilemma of whether to actually fix the problem and reduce the required pageviews to actually do stuff. It’s also interesting, because the guy who [...] Read more – ‘MySpace: Unstoppable Force or Unnecessary Click Factory?’.
sketches of Frank Gehry looks like a fantastic film (lovely high-def trailer here) – it’s got Sidney Pollack filming a documentary about Gehry’s creative processes – sketches, CAD (I’ve got a vague memory of some story about an ex IBMer innovating CAD in partnership with Gehry…ah, here it is… Read more – ‘Sketches of Frank Gehry’.
Public Knowledge – Net Neutrality Video is a two minute (extremely) high-level overview of the US-centric potential for telcos to dominate the internet landscape by favouring access to particular providers, or particular filetypes (e.g. video from apple). It’s all about mucky lobbying from telcos in Washington. I love the US centricity of this – surely [...] Read more – ‘watch as US telcos lobby the US into increasing irrelevance…’.
Worldmapper: The world as you’ve never seen it before – just saw this in New Scientist (my new favourite magazine). Fantastic maps, skewed to reflect economic and demographic details (like patents, or tourism spend). They’re incredibly powerful displays of quantitative data, not so much because they show proportion, but because of the massive distortion of [...] Read more – ‘Worldmapper: The world as you’ve never seen it before’.
I love these short narrated slide-shows from the NY Times. I think they’re just about perfect – 2 minutes in length, really evocative, but simple…if they were any longer, maybe they wouldn’t work as well. Read more – ‘Lovely NY Times audio slide shows…’.
I was sent a link to a video of Stephen Colbert’s skit at the White House Press dinner. Bloody hell. It was biting, snarky, on-the-money and generally a ballsy, incredibly critical, well, critique of the Bush Presidency, and, in particular, the mainstream press. He really stood up, in the best sense of journalism and fired [...] Read more – ‘mute media doesn’t mention Colbert’s biting performance…’.
BBC news article on the fiasco (and 1 _billion_! windfall from carbon emission trading: “Part of the problem, he said, is that firms have been given, free-of-charge, the carbon emissions permits on which the scheme is based. This, he explained, is like the government giving energy firms free money.” I’m really interested in the potential [...] Read more – ‘EU messes up carbon trading markets’.
Web 2.0 meets the enterprise | CNET News.com It’s a puffy, high-level piece, but this article pretty much sums up how I’ve been feeling for the last, oh, 3 years :-) It makes some important points – consumers (at home) come into work, use the same technologies and then think “hang on, why can’t my [...] Read more – ‘Web 2.0 meets the enterprise – CNET’.
Richard Florida article on the ‘spiky’ world – with 3D spikes of patents, creativity indexes etc – http://www.creativeclass.org/acrobat/TheWorldIsSpiky.pdf Read more – ‘Nice data visualisation…’.
Interesting article about how Toronto is approaching it’s goal of becoming a world-class city. It caught my eye, because it talks about the experiences of my adopted home city, Manchester: “‘He likes to cite Manchester, a decaying industrial city whose inner core was destroyed by an IRA bomb 10 years ago this summer. That catastrophe [...] Read more – ‘How to be a great city…Manchester’s creative destruction (and the lessons for IT innovation)’.
I got a Nabaztag (http://www.nabaztag.com) becuase I wanted to see the utility/benefit of an ‘ambient device’ , and living in the UK, can’t use “Ambient devices”:http://www.ambientdevices.com . The nabaztag is a lot of fun, but turn off the clock – it gets irritating. It is, at the moment, slightly gimmicky, but as the services develop [...] Read more – ‘My Nabaztag ‘ambient’ device…’.
Two interesting takes on Microsoft, Windows and Apple’s OSX. The first from the New York Times is more interesting, as it looks at the costs of inherited complexity, and critically, maintaining support for legacy applications. Cringely’s take on Apple’s Boot Camp (which loads Windows onto a new Intel-based Mac) is a lighter punch at Apple’s [...] Read more – ‘Windows, Windows, Windows…’.
I’ve just spent a brilliant weekend with three really smart guys thinking, designing and building Participo’s next two ideas. We spent a lot of time stepping back and thinking about what sort of problems we’re trying to solve and whether anyone would actually use the bloody things…we think yes. Anyway, I’m writing this because I [...] Read more – ‘fantastic ‘reality list’’.
Interesting, 2 minute read in Wired about game designers intentionally creating scarcity: “…But in a game world, there’s no inherent reason for scarcity. Game designers have given us plenty of utopias where we can have all the mithril we want, to buy whatever we want whenever we want it. Problem is, those worlds turn out [...] Read more – ‘People need Scarcity?’.
Check out the BBC2 Homepage, it’s completely focused around the actual shows – showing them, launching long clips and even full series archives, including the opportunity to see the entire series of ‘The Armstrongs’ – one of the most beautifully edited, absorbing documentary series I’ve seen for a long time… I love how they’ve simplified [...] Read more – ‘The BBC massively improves it’s web offerings…’.
Excellent summary of the benefits of KM from blogs – Joho the Blog: Blogging in Germany: “I continue to believe that for many companies the best path to blogging is by using them internally as a knowledge management tool. The dream of KM has been that people will write down what they know. KM regimes, [...] Read more – ‘Blogs as KM’.
The other day I was listening to James Surowiecki on an SXSW podcast talking about his book Wisdom of Crowds. I’d heard another of his talks about a year ago, but almost crashed the car this time around as I frantically tried to make notes (mental note to self…audio annotation on an ipod would be [...] Read more – ‘The Wisdom of Crowds…’.
Great Doc Searls essay in the Linux Journal. Too busy right now to think of eloquent critique, but here’s a gem quote: “Hence my idea: The Intention Economy. The Intention Economy grows around buyers, not sellers. It leverages the simple fact that buyers are the first source of money, and that they come ready-made. You [...] Read more – ‘Doc Searls riffs on intention vs. attention…’.
Is it just me, or does Microsoft’s Origami product look seem just like Apple’s Newton from the 1990′s? Right down to the attached keyboard… Read more – ‘Origami = Newton?’.
Last month’s Wired had an excellent article on – guys who are tweaking and customising advertising and marketing campaigns in real-time, based on the response to the messages… “”By changing the creation equation, Visible World’s adaptive ads adopt the “permanent beta” ethic of online marketing – advertisers can continually refine their message, swapping out offers [...] Read more – ‘Adaptive learning?’.
Sun Fire T2000 Server Try Before You Buy What a great idea – fill out the form and you get one of Sun’s ‘eco friendly’ servers to play with for a couple of months. Good write up on the strategy from Jonathan Schwartzhere. Bloody hell, write a decent review and you might get to keep [...] Read more – ‘Sun Fire T2000 Server Try Before You Buy’.
Interesting article on the financial and social impact on businesses in the event of an hn51 human crossover outbreak. I’ve talked about this several times with clients – not because I’m a pandemic specialist, but because we were moaning about how companies still mistrust home working and/or the culture of offices requires physical congregation. So [...] Read more – ‘Impact of Avian Flu on collaboration and home working? Knowledge@Wharton’.
New Scientist article says scientists have proven ‘sleeping on it’ is the best strategy for making complex decisions: “…At some point in our evolution, we started to make decisions consciously, and we’re not very good at it. We should learn to let our unconscious handle the complicated things…” Brilliant. By this measure, my cat must [...] Read more – ‘‘Sleeping on it’ best for complex decisions…’.
I’m liking today’s buzzy featureTechnorati Favorites, which is a pretty straightforward aggregator in Technorati, but nice and easy to ‘add favourites’ and so makes it a good, straightforward aggregator. Now, they make it really easy to _add_ feeds via opml etc, but I can’t see an export anywhere…seems an odd omission, as the CEO says [...] Read more – ‘Technorati Favorites – no opml export?’.
It just doesn’t matter is a great treatise by Jason Fried of 37signals of why they’ve left out certain stuff from their latest product. From the man himself: “…if it doesn’t change your behavior then it just doesn’t matter…Would these things be nice to have? Sure. Would they be great to have? Sure. Would they [...] Read more – ‘It just doesn’t matter – choosing what not to build…’.
Creating Passionate Users has a great write up of an academic study that shows neurons are developed in direct correlation to a stimulating physical environment: “…Eight years after Gould defied the dogma of her field and proved that the primate brain creates new cells, she has gone on to demonstrate that the structure of the [...] Read more – ‘Interesting surroundings make you smarter…’.
Ricky Gervais podcast goes paid for I’ve loved listening to the Ricky Gervais podcast, a good continuation of his genius xfm shows from a few years ago (the xfm radio station is where Gervais and Merchant met Karl Pilkington, the emergent star of the podcast and radio show. It was fantastic to see them, embrace [...] Read more – ‘Audible nabs popular podcast…’.
Scoble’s got interesting personal memetracker using his opml file as an uber-reading list. Now that’s pretty cool. But what if you could do semantic analysis, or some other kind of relationship inference based on your opml and get a reading list on _assumed, connected_ sources…but sources that don’t actually feature in your list – the [...] Read more – ‘Scopml?’.
Jeff Jarvis points out Inc Magazine’s new cover ‘Small is the new big’. Had to drop a comment on that site… as I excitedly showed my gf that exact cover yesterday in Borders – late last year I gave a talk on this ‘trend’…everything from localised power production, micro-finance, organic food, firefox, microformats, the $100 [...] Read more – ‘small…just one side of the story…’.
I really like the phrase ‘brain training’ – it’s a great phrase and feels ‘right’. I guess we all train our brains to some extent. But lately I’ve been getting very aware of some of my mental ‘flab’ and want to think leaner, faster, and more creatively. Almost certainly a side-effect of approaching my 34th [...] Read more – ‘tools for brain training…’.
Wired 14.02: Buddha on the Brain is a really interesting Wired story I just read about observations of Tibetan monks who have changed to physiology of their brain structure through meditation. Apparantly, Tibetan mocks showed massive, positive differences in their brain activity, compared with a control group of non meditators: “… The monks produced gamma [...] Read more – ‘Brain training…through meditation…’.
eSchool News online – Study: ‘Power Users’ drive pedagogy “…A new survey of teachers and instructors at the high school and post-secondary levels has found that students who excel in the use of information and communications technology (ICT) are driving change in classroom instruction…” File under “no shit, sherlock”. So we now start to see [...] Read more – ‘‘Power Users’ drive pedagogy’.
some quick notes in no particular order from Dan Hill’s talk tonight in Manchester (and a chance to try out the opml outliner…) Great talk…and not was I expecting (I thought he was going to talk about augmented realities and music and physical cityscapes for some reason…:-) Read more – ‘Dan Hill’s talk – some notes…’.
I gave a guest lecture today at Manchester Met Business School, and mentioned a few software tools and inspirations…here’s the list, guys :-) _Inspiration/Philosophy:_ Well, I guess the main one I mentioned is 37Signals – click here and look at the sidepanel under ‘writings’, there’s a bunch of essays on the ideas I was alluding [...] Read more – ‘notes from the MMU talk, 1st Feb, 2006’.
Dan Hill, who heads the very cool BBC Music & Interactive dept (and writes the excellent blog, cityofsound) is giving a talk in Manchester this Thursday (2nd Feb 2006) evening… “On related matters, I’m doing a ‘remix’ of my New Musical Experiences talk in Manchester on Thursday night (18:00, February 2nd 2006), at Manchester Metropolitan [...] Read more – ‘Interesting talk in Manchester this Thursday’.
I’ve just been reading Steven Downes riff on e-learning 2.0. He hits my personal nail right on the head with this argument: “The reason organizations *have* training departments is so that learning needs can be identified and means for assisting workers in meeting those needs be assembled.” “What you are saying is something like, “You [...] Read more – ‘training departments are holiday companies…’.
I’ve been thinking about lists a lot for the last 6 months or so, ever since Dave Winer started developing reading lists using opml. Reading lists are an incredible, beautifully simple idea – you take a list of rss feeds in opml format and subscribe to the list. Someone else manages the list, and you [...] Read more – ‘more on reading lists…’.
Microsoft Bloggers is a ‘top 10′ list of various Microsoft bloggers and links to their blogs… This would make a perfect reading list – sucks the feeds in automatically, shows me collated entries and I let Mary Jo Foley keep the list up to date.. Read more – ‘Microsoft Bloggers – a perfect reading list!’.
see one of the best ads of the year here I watch so little TV, when I do, I’m eternally grateful for cool adverts. Honda, over the last year, have run some excellent ads about ‘the power of dreams’. The above is one of the family, although a slight departure, because it actually features a [...] Read more – ‘Beautiful Honda (UK) ad…’.
now, let me disclaim that I dislike the idea of printing from an ecological perspective, and I’ve avoided buying a scanner for several years, simply because every time I’ve needed on I’ve used a camera instead…and got by. but I finally broke down and bought an all in one hp device…because it has an ethernet [...] Read more – ‘I’m all excited…by a printer…’.
cabel.name: On Brain Training is a really intriguing story about the latest gaming craze sweeping Japan…and it’s ‘brain training’ – puzzles that you play on a Nintendo DS, held in book/portrait mode. I _love_ the sound of this…it combines Nintendo DS. a wide range of demographics and simple games that sound fun and educational… My [...] Read more – ‘Japanese brain training…’.
stop for 5 minutes and read this, it’s quite a fantastic story about the greatest. I quite like boxing, even though I loathe ‘sport’ and can’t shake the intellectual dissatisfaction with the core idea of knocking someone’s brain against their skull until they fall over. But boxing back then, and particularly with Ali, seemed like [...] Read more – ‘beautiful writing…’.
Guy pointed towards Pligg in his “Links for 2006-01-14″ post. Having played around with Digg for a while, I was amazed at the similarity of the two sites. In fact, except for Digg’s use of a blue-and-yellow theme and Pligg’s use of a green-and-orange (blecch) theme, it was hard to ascertain the difference between the [...] Read more – ‘Digg, Pligg, and the Internet Echo Chamber’.
IBM has taken to blogs and podcasts in a big way according to a pair of articles in the Journal News, a paper serving Westchester County, NY, the site of IBM’s corporate headquarters. The first article, by reporter Julie Moran Alterio, describes IBM’s enthusiastic and well thought-out approach to blogging. After discussions with bloggers inside [...] Read more – ‘IBM embraces blogs and podcasts’.
The web is a great place to find step-by-step histories of DIY projects. From case-mod projects to Lego models, to sites such as MAKE magazine, these sites are filled with pictorial narratives of creations mundane and extreme. One thing missing in many of these logs, however, is collaboration: the ability to ask questions, make suggestions, [...] Read more – ‘Step-by-step instruction and collaboration’.
Printable, corner bookmarks (for annotation). I love stuff like this – beautifully simple, but really quite bloody useful. Merry Christmas! (Via Tom Coates.) Read more – ‘simple corner ‘bookmarks’’.
As well as After action Reviews, I’ve been reading aboutaccountable autonomy. This idea of ‘accountable autonomy’ is a pretty powerful one, it’s exactly the sort of empowerment, with responsibility, that I’ve been banging on about in education; employees are rarely given the accountability to take control of their own learning paths – they’re subjected to [...] Read more – ‘Flattening Hierarchies in Business…using blogs (2 of 2)’.
WorldChanging talks about flattening hierarchies in business, interestingly, they pick up on After Action Reviews as a key agent of change: “…often recommend institutionalizing After-Action Reviews in companies. After-Action Reviews were first used by the US Army in the 1970′s and spread to the business world in the 1990′s; they encourage feedback up and down [...] Read more – ‘Flattening Hierarchies in Business…using blogs (1 of 2)’.
PARK(ing) – some guys built a little park in a parking lot in the middle of urbanised sprawl. What a fantastic idea…and good set of photos that show how how people immediately change according to physical environment. (Via Kottke.) Read more – ‘PARK(ing)’.
How to use Copenhagen City Bikes. Lovely write up of Copenhagen’s rather nifty bike rental scheme. I just found this in my drafts folder. What a great few days attending the Reboot conference. So this would have been much more in chronological context if I’d posted it back in May. And I rode one of [...] Read more – ‘How to use Copenhagen City Bikes’.
God, what a difference six months makes. I kind of forgot about last.fm and their fab audio plugin for itunes. It’s a site that is, basically a personalised, yet communal, and very public radio station, that listens to you – to throw out recommendations, tags, and personalised streaming radio stations. Late 2004, and early this [...] Read more – ‘Last.fm – musical objects’.
Using some excellent miniature photography, humor and a playful sensibility, Ping Mag takes you through an initial presentation to a client — y’know, the one where they ask, “Can we get this done by next Friday?” They go through what they call the work-feedback-rework process in 15 steps. (Strangely, “work-feedback-rework” — which is an excellent [...] Read more – ‘The Website Development Process’.
personalworldmap.org is a lovely interactive and _shifting_ world map that adjusts its spacial orientation according to ability to travel…the land masses actually shift shape and proximity according to airfare value (African destinations move further away than Australian), distance or travel time. I love stuff like this. TheThe Map Book looks rather nifty as well, and [...] Read more – ‘personalworldmap.org’.
OPML Workstation Home looks interesting – a way to convert PowerPoint to OPML. Interesting, because most of the thinking and intellectual output in companies I’ve dealt with is exclusively locked in PowerPoint. People think, create and share ideas in this hideous program, but sharing is via email. And people in orgs are collaborating, they’re sending [...] Read more – ‘PowerPoint -> opml convertor’.
del.icio.us bought by yahoo Well, the web’s awash with the inevitable news, and it makes me think the bubble is simply an exciting R&D lab based mainly in SF. The main action seems to be in ‘build to flip’ business models, which is fine, when you think about it, as the big boys are simply [...] Read more – ‘del.icio.us -> Yahoo = Darwinian R&D’.
CNN.com – Mizuho loses $224m on typing error – Dec 9, 2005: “Japanese brokerage Mizuho Securities scrambled on Friday to clean up the mess left by a trader who mistakenly offered tens of thousands of shares for 1 yen apiece, costing the firm at least $224 million.Admitting to the massive error, the brokerage unit of [...] Read more – ‘Mizuho loses $224m on typing error’.
Ogre to Slay? Outsource It to Chinese – New York Times Fantastic: “From Seoul to San Francisco, affluent online gamers who lack the time and patience to work their way up to the higher levels of gamedom are willing to pay the young Chinese here to play the early rounds for them…” Isn’t there a [...] Read more – ‘Outsourcing gameplay to Chinese workers..’.
Tom Hume: Selling New Mobile Phone Features Twitchr is a fascinating sounding ‘game’ that uses constructivism to teach features and use of a mobile phone…which is exactly the approach I was pushing with Vodafone a few years back, except I’d come up with the idea of teaching photoblogging – inroduce the camera, MMS, email photos [...] Read more – ‘Tom Hume: Selling New Mobile Phone Features’.
AppleInsider | Image Gallery – shows Google Earth for the Mac. Fantastic. This is probably the only application that’s on the PC (apart from some games) that I’ve really envied. I’ve never even seen this in action, but I’ve heard good things about it – imagine you had this in your Geography classes. It would [...] Read more – ‘Google Earth – coming to the Mac’.
IBM to support OpenDocument early next year | Tech News on ZDNet: “‘The governments of India, China and other emerging markets are very interested in this,’ Fontaine said. ‘They don’t have the legacy of having everything saved in Microsoft Office to transition from…This is an opportunity to start out right.’” This is fascinating – hot [...] Read more – ‘IBM to support OpenDocument early next year’.
Wired 13.12: Thinking Outside the Box Office Soderbergh’s releasing his film on DVD, Theatres and Hi-def cable all at the same time. “Name any big-title movie that’s come out in the last four years. It has been available in all formats on the day of release. It’s called piracy. Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings, [...] Read more – ‘Wired 13.12: Thinking Outside the Box Office’.
Can Google Go Glossy? Interesting insight into Google’s experiments with running prints ads, by divvying them up to adwords customers. And poor results: “The whole power of the Web is to bring targeted visitors to your site,” says Jennifer Blackhurst, co-founder of TrimYourDebt. “The print ad hasn’t done this, so it didn’t justify the cost.” [...] Read more – ‘Can Google Go Glossy?’.
Google: Ten Golden Rules – Issues 2006 – MSNBC.com Google’s take on ensuring ‘knowledge workers’ are at their most creative/productive. Interesting snippet: Make coordination easy. Because all members of a team are within a few feet of one another, it is relatively easy to coordinate projects. In addition to physical proximity, each Googler e-mails a [...] Read more – ‘Google: Ten Golden Rules – Issues 2006 – MSNBC.com’.
Talking-Head Video Is Boring Online (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox): “” Nice use of eye tracking software to review viewer behaviour…as TV becomes more interactive, will ‘viewers’ still sit still. I’m unconvinced by the arguments here, though, there’s a lot of subtext to a keeping half a (tracked?) eye on a face while soaking in other info…and [...] Read more – ‘Talking-Head Video Is Boring Online (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)’.
So, we’ve begun the looong overdue process of a redesign…I say we, ‘cos I haven’t done it – a mate, Paul, from Salted has done me proud… I’ll be sorting out related posts, archive templates, playing around with tags (well, one really must) and so on… So, if you could bear with us… Read more – ‘redesign’.
In this blog post, you will learn: * Why courseware sucks * A confession from a recovering Instructional Designer * A rant Hmmm, so I misspelt a message I was writing about some pre-existing courses I’m helping a client turn into Disability compliant content – and I typed curseware. Sounds about right – a rather [...] Read more – ‘Curseware…’.
BT dials up free mobile phone calls service “BT is to take on leading mobile phone operators such as Vodafone and O2 by enabling customers to make free calls on their mobiles. The service has been under development at BT for the past 18 months. It will be available to customers owning smartphones, the latest [...] Read more – ‘This is (almost) massive…’.
The Harvard Crimson :: News :: Harvard Offers Course Via iPod Fantastic. Apparently, only a few CompSci intro courses, but still… It’s interesting that it’s got to take a ‘cool tool’ such as the iPod Video as the platform – iTunes on a PC is a fantastic video playback environment – and sucks in video [...] Read more – ‘Harvard podcasts lecture video…’.
Create an Audio Clip is a neat little feature I just noticed on IT Conversations…plug in a start and end time, and voila – a little 2 minute clip to stick on your blog, intranet etc.. Great idea – would be great to start/subscribe a delicious feed of clips from someone’s pick of the archives. [...] Read more – ‘Create an Audio Clip: cool little IT Conversations feature..’.
So, maybe I was a little hasty thinking (just a little bit) that the measuremap beta was more marketing than pragmatic demand throttling. This from Adaptive Path’s Jeffrey Veen: ??”When we started planning for the launch of Measure Map, we spent a lot of time trying to estimate how it would scale. As a hosted [...] Read more – ‘The perpetual beta and buzz building…’.
Dave Winer talks about Yahoo and their adoption of opml for subscription output. Very cool. However, he finishes on a innocuous but really bloody important point – a standard way of representing an RSS/Atom/whatever feed to consumers…a simple subscribe button – as demoed on the right hand column of this blog. It’s a small, but [...] Read more – ‘Winer says SUBSCRIBE’.
At long last, like 3 years, I’ve decided to whack in a quick email form…I’d resisted for ages, because I liked the idea of comment, but I just looked in the comments and I have about 300 poker etc. comments, so I’ll need to sort out the blacklist. In the meantime, if you want to [...] Read more – ‘email form…’.
We spend so much time looking at the potential of the Internet to change the way we live, work, learn and relate to one another, that it is easy to forget that the real world, with all its savagery and misplaced passions is just outside our doors. Participo is a trans-Atlantic blog and its authors [...] Read more – ‘Virtual vs. Real’.
Doug Kaye’s new ad-venture… “We will cover not just IT or even technology, but literally every topic about which someone speaks and another person finds it valuable enough to capture.” (Via Doc Searls.) Read more – ‘Fantastic’.
Fascinating note on the Register about complaint’s from players of Sony’s Everquest role playing game. Sony’s going to arbitrate the sales of character powerups etc. – it’s a booming trade. But swarming, monopolistic capitalistic tendencies are diminishing the actual playability of the game: “Most Far Eastern sites are thought to employ cheap labor working in [...] Read more – ‘Gaming devalued by economics?’.
Adobe announced today that they will be buying Macromedia for US$3.4 billion. these two former adversaries (in the legal space, too) will become one company in the autumn. At first glance it seems to be a combination fraught with overlapping market areas, but maybe not… There are a few software products which are sure to [...] Read more – ‘Adobe to buy Macromedia’.
It’s starting to happen – I’m actually enjoying running a business. After 3 and a bit years working for RWD, I was nervous (to say the least) about setting up some businesses and striking out. And the crap of invoicing, financial management and so on is as dreary as I anticipated. But today, after working [...] Read more – ‘Cool Tools for start-ups…’.
My biz partner has been thinking about using podcasting for recording lectures and teacher’s comments – loudish – Podcasting for Education: “…Teacher’s notes, student’s notes other information could be easily dictated and recorded and encapsulated into a podcast, news feed information could be added to the mix, just as we do for the corporate area…” [...] Read more – ‘Podcasting – *perfect* app for education’.
EverQuest II – /pizza: Bloody hell, if ever the stereotype of unfit computer gamers didn’t spring to mind before…quite a genius moment of product placement though, isn’t it? I’m just trying to think of suitable product placements for, um, Grand Theft Auto…local dealer, perhaps? :-) (Via Jason Kottke.) Read more – ‘EverQuest II – /pizza’.
Adobe Studio Presents: Milton Glaser Lovely video of (ok, I profess I hadn’t heard of him) Milton Glaser, a designer whose work through the decades I definitely recognise. Nice shooting, editing, and the theme of the monologue is the power of being continually surprised and interested in stuff…”i think a lot of people as they [...] Read more – ‘Milton Glaser’.
Digital cameras redesign the photographic process | The Register : “” This is really interesting – we’re seeing the evolution of omnipresent media recording – a complete visual (and hopefully audio) memory of our activities. Add auto-sensing/tagging of location from GPS and flickr style emergence of photo ‘sets’ and we’re getting closer to losing any [...] Read more – ‘See and hear everything I do?’.
I can’t really comprehend the instant loss of a 100,000 people, but please, if you haven’t already, donate some money to DEC – Tsunami Earthquake – donation, a centralised source of aid (Oxfam, etc.)… Read more – ‘Words cannot express…’.
Wired 13.01: START. As a nice footnote to Evan’s earlier post on musical accompaniment, Wired’s posted a brief note on the innovative use of music to signal changes in financial information flow: “…That lengthy marimba trill coming from the left speaker, for example? It represents a trade involving a large quantity of short-maturity treasury bonds. [...] Read more – ‘Traders use music to manage complex information flow…’.
MIT’s Technology Review has got a quick-to-read article on Amazon’s web services…excellent overview. And there was a nice non, techy Salon article on flickr yesterday. Flickr is simply genius, and their API is shit-hot. Witness the majesty of 1001 an app that streams the latest uploaded photos on your desktop (mac only…). I’ve got so [...] Read more – ‘web 2.0’.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, Robin Good, in his recent “10 Technologies which will change the way we learn in the future” discussed several discrete trends and challenged us to think about how they may affect the world of learning. I believe that all of Robin’s listed technologies are already here, and I’ve [...] Read more – ‘Your life… online’.
One of the first educational milestones for an American child is singing the ABCs by herself. It’s a silly little tune [RealAudio], and once the child has mastered it, the innate love of repetition leads the kid to sing the song over and over and over and over… and over… again. There’s a particular joy [...] Read more – ‘Sing to learn’.
In honor of Global Learn Day VIII, Robin Good has posted his list of the ten technologies that will change the way we learn in the future. The technologies he lists are: Search technologies Data visualization tools Blogs Audio and video RSS P2P Unlimited storage Unlimited bandwidth Real Time Collaboration Collective and Collaborative Filtering (One [...] Read more – ‘The Technological Future of Learning’.
The Sect of Homokaasu – The Rasterbator Trust me , the title of the link is not what it may appear – it’s a brilliant web-based app that takes photos, rasterises (makes them dotted, newspaper-style) that enables them to blown up to HUGE sizes – like up to 20 metres! I just took an image [...] Read more – ‘Amazing poster generator’.
Who Knows? Jay Cross’s CLO magazine article Punchy write up of sharing knowledge in orgs. Interesting emergent themes he covers, that I’ve been thinking about a lot – knowledge workers waste *lots* of time finding stuff, and people who’ve been around the org for a while, regardless of rank, are a goldmine of info. I [...] Read more – ‘Jay Cross on group knowledge’.
haha…. the Welsh commenting on knowledge management, a bit like texans commenting on Peace Treaty’s. But true to my stereotype…I am a KM novice… I know nothing about it really apart from the abbreviation, which I will continue to bandy about like I know what I am talking about. It feels so very good to [...] Read more – ‘is Anthropology KM daddy?’.
This feels strange, somewhat exclusive…. I have only done a very *minor* amount of blogging and getting back into it is like going back to playing darts. A sport that I have only tried once or twice, which consequently has produced some very shaky and un-inspiring results. Not that I have attended many exclusive darts [...] Read more – ‘Darts, Online NGO’s and open source solutions’.
Autodemo “…In as little as three weeks, our talented writers, producers, and developers can create an engaging demo that clearly and concisely communicates the features and benefits of your product to prospects and customers…” Hmm, I could do that with Snapz Pro, Quicktime and a microphone… Read more – ‘Narrate demos for websites…’.
Best Practices for Webcast Meetings “…eLearning Forum has attempted to webcast six sessions. Centra, Groove, and Interwise have contributed their services. Experience has taught us:” Pretty good summation of ideas to make web presentations work. Their Nokia elearning meeting should be online soon. That should be interesting. Read more – ‘Making web presentations work…’.
One of the most basic rules in interface design is known as Fitts’ Law , after Paul Fitts, a psychologist at Ohio State University who studied human response time in rapid aimed movements. Basically, Fitts’ model claimed that accuracy in rapid hand movements decreases in inverse relation to the distance from and size of the [...] Read more – ‘Fitts’ Law and alternatives’.
Randinah writes on kuro5hin about the case of Evan Brown, a veteran IT professional who approached his bosses one day in 1997 about jointly developing a potentially-valuable software idea he claims to have been thinking about since 1976 — long before he started this job. His employer, a Texas company called DSC Communications (since swallowed [...] Read more – ‘Who owns my daydreams?’.
George F. Colony, the Chairman & CEO of Forrester Research writes his monthly column this time about “Naked Technology“. His quick take: “Injecting technology into a company without process and organizational change creates waste and chaos.” The key word here is “injecting.” How many times have you turned on your computer to find you’ve gotten [...] Read more – ‘Injections versus seepage’.
Openwire – Moveable Type Search “…Due to the big changes (particularly in regards to MT v2.2), I have released an upgrade to MT-Search. The changelog since v1.2 (which most of you have) looks like this: v1.31b – Now supports MySQL and MT v2.2 thanks to Phil Ringnalda. v1.3b – New Features: * Full MT Tag [...] Read more – ‘excellent….’.
Well, we have six authors so far here (although only *two* really post anything – something I’ll try and change as time goes on). As you know, this blog runs on movabletype and when I donated, I got a key to notify their “recently updated” section – this may or may not generate traffic to [...] Read more – ‘Calling all authors – do you want publicity?’.
BBC NEWS | Business | Scam jams Japanese phone lines “…Phone lines in Osaka and the surrounding region were jammed on Monday – the second time this month – as a result of multiple calls made mechanically by one company. The company involved has over 200 phone lines and programmes them via a machine to [...] Read more – ‘Spam II – calls to Japanese mobiles…’.
Seblogging: Dynamic Webpublishing, CMS and Weblogs in Education : by Sebastian Fiedler Weblogs, CMS, and dynamic Webpublishing for learning and education is a new (to me) weblog on all of the above -initial impression is that it’s worth having a look….maybe a good candidate for the thought rss feed?? Read more – ‘interesting edu focused weblog’.
It’s funny, in a Beavis & Butthead sort of way. (Especially disgusting are the learning objectives.) But it does go to show that there is a need for (good) e-Learning in many unexpected places. Manure Pit Hazards is one of the chapters from Lessons in Farm Safety, an interactive curriculum used to teach children about [...] Read more – ‘e-Learning down on the farm…’.
Atlassian – JIRA – J2EE Issue Tracking, Bug Tracking and Project Management Software “…Tracking and managing the issues and bugs that emerge during a software development project is a critically important task, but one that few development teams do effectively. JIRA is a J2EE-based, issue tracking and project management application developed to make this process [...] Read more – ‘Rather nifty looking web based project management app’.
FT.com / Lex WorldCom’s accounting fraud was revealed when the company, owing to a combination of collapsing revenues and excessive debt, was already heading towards bankruptcy and was already a penny stock. WorldCom takes over the mantle of largest US bankruptcy from Enron which, in contrast, was brought down by the revelation of its trickery. [...] Read more – ‘WorldCom~Telecom meltdown’.
E-Learning – Is E-learning Floundering? “…Is e-learning as we know it a failure? According to Forrester Research (www.forrester.com), 70 percent of those who start an e-learning course never complete it…” Read more – ‘Is E-learning Floundering?’.
It’s important to know the frames of reference of those we are teaching or training. Each year, Beloit College publishes their “Mindset List”, “a compilation of items that indicate the viewpoints and frame of reference of entering students.” The most recent list, for the Class of 2005, reminds us that these people were born the [...] Read more – ‘Things change (feeling old…)’.
Self-paced Courses in html4 and xhtml/css Over the next few months, in weekly installments you’ll find here our foundation course HTML 4.0 and XHTML for CSS. By way of zeldman Read more – ‘free web courses in html4 and xhtml/css’.
With a grant from the Mellon Foundation, the University of Michigan Digital Library Production Services has developed OAIster, a “harvesting” engine for difficult-to-access digital resources, such as images, manuscripts, audio files and the like. These assets, in university, museum and library collections are often impossible to find using standard search engines which are unable to [...] Read more – ‘Pearls from OAIster’.
eLearning Forum Last one blew up because of Centra problems, but this ones promises to be good – and free to attend by phoen and Centra: Distance Collaboration and Learning Communities Sally Crawford, CEO of Crawford & Associates International, will moderate a panel of real-world practitioners: Distance Collaboration: Why Collaborate, and Adoption Case Study and [...] Read more – ‘e-learning forum – interesting virtual meetings’.
Right so I am out of the flea pit that contained the 2000 or so hackers and ended up here. I’m in “The W” in S.F that has everything in the room (apart from an automagical teamaking robot). I didnt trust the wavelan access so I will post my thought over the next 2 days [...] Read more – ‘out of flea pit’.
We all know that different students have different learning styles. Students and online learners can determine their particular learning style with Diablo Valley College’s Learning Style Survey for College designed by Catherine Jester & Suzanne Miller. Read more – ‘Learning Styles’.
The US is facing a national teacher shortage of crisis proportions. The aging of the current teaching force, the nationwide initiatives to reduce class sizes, the (until a few months ago) tight labor market, and the historically low salaries for teachers when compared with other college-graduate professionals have all contributed to this problem. Many states [...] Read more – ‘E-learning & the Teacher Shortage in Florida’.
[brad choate dot com] SQL Plugin Fantastic. No need to use php and inc’s and array’s from the query result and etc etc….this looks really powerful – time to play on w/e I feel. Read more – ‘easy sql for movable type…’.
Well, I know it’s only been functional for a few days, but we are now three authors – Evan meet Paul, Paul meet Evan! Evan is a colleague in Baltimore – web designer and raconteur – Paul is a freelance web designer and racketeer in Bristol, UK. Basically, you’re both designers, I think this site [...] Read more – ‘This site – redesign?’.
ZDNet |UK| – News – Story – Patent fight holds up Web standards In true Micro-mafia stylee….. Microsoft and IBM are trying to muscle in on the W3C over licensing of future multimedia and web standards, with Sun tugging at their shirt tails like an annoying younger brother (as they do) to keep it all [...] Read more – ‘Patent fight holds up Web standards’.
