Author (#2)March 2005 Archives

I just went into my Moveable Type Admin to delete a test entry, clicked on comments by accident and noticed I had a bunch of comments waiting for approval. Darn it, I forgot to setup auto emailing of comments to me. So, yes I wasn't paying attention to any of you but not on purpose ;-). Got it set up now. Oh, and I got my first comment spam from the new server. Grr!

I just recently re-subscribed to Netflix. I was a member back around 99-2000. I enjoyed it at the time but then came TiVo. I couldn't keep up with both so I bagged Netflix. Well, I've been getting frustrated with the lack of good quality TV, so I've thought about getting rid of television and the TiVo. In preparation, I thought let's subscribe to Netflix again and see how I like it.

I wasn't expecting any real innovation since I last subscribed. The site layout was OK. The recommendations terrible. Both have improved a bit. But I was pleasantly surprised with their Friends feature. Basically, it allows you to see what your friends are renting and rating. Nothing terrible innovative about that. But what impressed me is that with zero work on my part, aside from sending out a few email invites, my Friends tab was filled with really great relevant content. I hate doing work and most of the community web apps out there (Orkut, Yahoo 360, etc) require work to generate a rich community online experience. I experienced the opposite with Netflix. The other thing that makes Friends really work is that there's a reason to participate in the community. My friends benefit from me rating movies and I benefit from them doing so. With the other community apps, there's really no reason to participate after an initial startup period.

I had a couple of ideas to improve Netflix Friends some more:

• Allow me to rate movies that my friends recently watched directly from the Friends page. Right now I have to clickthrough to a detail page. Lame.
• Let me page through all the movies a friend has rated (by rating level). Ridiculous that I can't do that.
• Let me subscribe to my friend's queues via RSS.
• It would be cool to disagree with a friend. Like Erik rated Lawrence of Arabia two starts. What's wrong with that kid? :-)
• This isn't really a friends idea but it would be cool. I use Cin-o-matic to keep track of what movies in theaters I want to watch. It also alerts me when those movies come out on DVD (if I didn't get a chance to see them). You have to wonder why Netflix hasn't integrated with a movies type site yet. It would be another reason to return to the site. You really should be able to go to Netflix to manage your whole movie watching experience not just rentals. Adding new theater releases to your Netflix queue and have them automatically sent to you when they come out would be awesome.

I started out the conference finding it difficult to get oriented. The first half of each day was a burst of small 15 minute presentations which were hard to follow from a tending perspective right away. But by the second day I got the hang of it. Another on day one, many of the sessions were presenting things I already heard through other Internet channels. I was surprised by just how much I knew simply by reading the small circle of blogs/RSS feeds I keep up on. But soon enough, there was plenty I'd never heard of before. Lots of learning happening.

Again, as at the Accelerating Change conference I attended last November, actively taking notes during all the sessions was invaluable. Simple things like hyper-linking to things presenters brought up in their talks immediately would be something I could never remember after the fact. I'm looking forward to going back through the notes and thinking about something to the topics presented in more depth. I think I'll also put together a ETech blog list (from blog links I collected in my posts) and track some of the speakers for a while. I'll post the list once I get them all collected.

One thing about the conference was that it was real energizing. Mostly from the perspective of getting plugged into what's happening by the innovators who live at the beginning of the technology adoption life-cycle. It also gave me a clearer perspective and appreciation for some of the innovative things happening around in my own work place. Yes I admit it, I'm probably spoiled.

Finally, all of the real innovative stuff was being done by real small groups of people--even in orgs the size of the BBC. Small is the way to go. But how can big orgs control small groups and make sure they're heading in the right direction? Usually, they impose bureaucracy to minimize risk. Nothing earth shattering there. But the bureaucracy kills the pace of innovation. What's the right balance point? Tough, tough problem that I haven't really heard anyone address with a solid solution yet.

My daily summaries can be found here:

• Day 1 thoughts
• Day 2 thoughts
• Day 3 thoughts

Remix preso was excellent. It should have been the opening keynote. It would have introduced the notion of "remixing" much better than in Rael Dornfest's opening talk. Notes here.

Yet another BBC talk. Today's preso was on how the BBC was working on opening _all_ their content to public use under Creative Commons. All you see is big ass media companies in the states blocking any sort of remixing use of media. Those Brits are really forward looking. I used to think the BBC was some big stodgy company--not any longer. Notes here.

I had a flash back moment to 90's Internet crazyness. Evan Odeo (founder of Blogger, sold to Google) was presenting his new startup. If you hit the website, there's nothing up yet. But for folks at the session he gave a tour of the site and it's features. People were snapping away with their digital cameras and phones like there was some big, big, big idea there. People, it's just podcasting. I like podcasting, but come on, we're not talking Netscape in 1995. On another note, goes to show that ideas aren't that original. See my old personal NPR idea. Notes here.

The Bloglines session could easily justify the entire cost of ETech for those looking to start up a new web based company. Maybe not for tech heads but for more business oriented folks like me, it was invaluable information for being able to talk intelligently with software engineers you're working with to build your website. Another interesting thing about this session was how it contrasted "building web apps" given by 37Signals. SDE versus a designer's perspective. Imagine what either of these to folks' apps would look like if they teamed up? Probably increadible. Notes here.

The author or The Long Tail made a an interesting insight (he's still researching). That's the notion that the long tail is really made of millions of small tails. What's a small tail? Take a sub genre of something like Punk in music. It could have it's very own long tail. There should be a few top selling Punk titles that make a bulk of purchases but many more in the tail that together make up a big amount of purchasing. You can apply this to really any sub or sub-sub genre in Google. Seems to make a lot of sense to me. Notes here.

Mark Fletcher, on his experience starting up companies
Garage philosophy. Started working on Bloglines on his own while he was still working at other companies. You need:

• Passion - because it will consume your life
• Cheap technologies - great time to start an Internet service. Hardware/software is getting cheaper
• Keep it simple - keep it simple both for users and technology
• Release early and often - it's really important to get things out there and incrementally improve. Your users will have better ideas about your service than you will
• Moonlighting limits risks - Worked nights and weekends; friends/family are the first people you should look for funds because they want to see you succeed; free services == less pressure (it's not the end of the world if your service is down for a few hours)
• Hire a lawyer
• Web services APIs are a good thing
• Find good help (especially sys admin)
• Outsource to eLance.com (you can outsource all kinds of stuff. Have contractors bid for your work)

Architectur 101: Front-end (web, mail servers); Backend (user dbs, other dbs, storage)

Software choices

• DBJ (http://cr.yp.to) qmail djbdns daemontools
• ClearSilver (web templating package)
• Berkeley DBs
• Linux/Apache
• C/C++/bash/python
• Skiplist data structure (a data structure algorithm)
• Avoid NFS (has a tendency to look up systems without explanation)
• Avoid table-level locking in MySQL (doesn't scale)

Hardware choices

• Two choices: dedicated servers vs. buying/hosting. They went the dedicated server route. Cost less to get going
• Design for cheap hardware - Google is the shining example of this
• eBay - you can get hardware on the cheap
• APC PDUs for remote power cycleing (power strips you can log into and cycle if a machine has crashed on you)
• HP ProCurve (machines work great)
• Avoid Seagate Ultra-SCSI drives
• Good phone for SSH - likes a Treo so you can log into your machines from anywhere

Architecture choices

• Copying files vs. client/server (they end up copy files around like bloglines RSS feeds)
• Calculate on the fly vs. cache (subscriber counts at bloglines are delivered by a once a day process) Memory vs. Disk

Storage choices

• Relational DBs vs. Flat Files (all blog articles are stored as flat files--all 3M articles)
• RAID vs. Redundant (they ensure blog articles are replicated across all machines--why? if a box goes down, you don't lose available of an article)
• Linux software RAID 1 - rock solid

Sysadmin choices

• DNS round robin for web servers - don't have to worry about setting up a load balancer
• Hot back-ups for off-line processing - backup every hour
• Worry about cooling in the co-lo (if you start to have hard drive failures, that's a good indicator that you might be having cooling problems)

Tidbit from Q&A. The size of the company was under ten at the Ask Jeeves acquisition.

Personal friends aggregator. Aggregates friend's posts and displays them in a single feed. Kind of a cool idea. I missed part of the intro so didn't pick up all the details. Sounds interesting. Unfortunately the demo was hosed because of a network issue.

Evan Williams, Co-Founder, Blogger
His talk is about podcasting and his new startup, Odeo. Podcasting is evolving very quickly. One of the keys will be how to find good stuff. Odeo aggregates audio data. Still affliated with Google although whether it's a Google funded startup was vague.

Basic UI (not yet public but he showed at the conference) is "Learn," "Sync," and "Create" buttons. Users will have the ability to tag podcasts. There are podcast detail pages where you can subscribe to individual podcasts. They used a stripped down iPodder to sync podcasts to your iPod. To help with discovery, you can see what other people have subscribed to (community aspect).

Showed the creation pipeline (to generate your own podcasts. They wanted tools for creating podcasts to be as easy as tools are today for creating blogs. You can create content for distribution on Odeo. Odeo Studio is an in-browser recording/publishing system (built using Flash). You can record easily from you browser (demo was cool). They have some utilities included as well (like the ability to integrate introduction music for your podcast). You hit a publish button when you're done and your podcast is automatically posted to the site. Eventually, they want to make it possible for content providers to be able to charge for their content.

Looks like a fun project.

Danny O'Brien, Merlin Mann (43Folders fame)
Introduction. Hackers love storing their information in text. You can search easily, you can jam information in easily. ~/bin was where hackers put their stuff (their home directory). What is a life hack? It's a patch you apply to something to help make things better.

Some of his predictions from last year. What happened with Email search in the last year? Gmail, LookOut, Tiger Spotlight makes it easer to work with mail dynamically. Social filesharing for everyone: Flickr, Novell iFolder, Groove. Easy webscraping: the idea was to convert web pages people thought were important into RSS feeds. This hasn't really popped up yet. Keyboard macros for Win/Linux. QuickSilver does this on the Mac side.

Things that have caught on at 43Folders. Getting things done--a framework for making progress on the projects that are important to you. Get things you want done into atomic activities that you can more easily track. This is one of the things people come to 43Folders for. "I have these challenges in my life and this is how I choose to form the solutions." Example, Hipster PDA--old fashion note cards to track things. Talked about really positive feedack about a Linux app Remind. A terminal based app? Yes! Cool to think a modest little calendar app might make people start to learn to use the terminal.

Three mysteries that Danny saw transfer over but why. Why the keyboard (keyboard shortcuts)? Speeds you up. Increases your flow. Mentioned MS research on task switching done by Mary Czerwinski. Why do geeks like big monitors? Allows them to context switch very easily--switch to another window without interrupting your flow.

The dark secret of life hacks: how to be really productive in your life--turn off internet, email, instant messenger. People are being drowned by distractions. We have to find a technical solution to this. Ideas to solve: eliminate navigation; put things into the background; eliminating distractions warnings ("do you really want to keep looking at the web 15 minute warming").

Danny's predictions for the next life hacks for 2005: Google Suggest type apps; the rise of passive performers (like OS X Dashboard) apps that don't interrupt you, you can switch in and out with ease; a unified notification UI (e.g. Growl); wasn't sure whether desktop search was a solution to context switching (making it easier to search without interrupting what you're doing too much.

Nikolaj Nyholm, what aspects have opened up wifi to hackers
Wifi started by freeing you up in your space, then public spaces (like coffee shops), then moved it to work, now moving into the sky (in planes) allowing things like IM, Skype. Told a story of babysitting his kid remotely from 40K feet using IM, Skype and remote dektop.

Open spectrum - the 2.4 and 5mHz spectrums are open. Wifi standards--no one needs to ask whether they can build wifi into a chip. Mass commoditization has empowered cheap access points.

Open WRT. Take a Linksys, upload the WRT firmware, use this firmware and software to manage small office settings. Community is one way to handle security. See everyone who is on the network. This was a tough preso to take notes on. The presenter seemed very sharp but was very hard to follow in any coherent manner. The big take away (I think) is Open WRT.

Chris Anderson, talking about the long tail
There's a history with the long tail. Take TV. As cable channels came around, the share of network channels have been falling. We went from an 80/20 distribution (in 1985) to a 50/50 distribution today. Other long tail examples--Google: long tail advertisers; eBay: long tail hard goods; offshoring: long tail services

The three forces of the long tail:

1. Democratize the tools of production (minimize the costs of distribution) eg. GarageBand
2. Minimize the costs of distribution which minimize the costs of consumption
3. Connect consumers to amplify word of mouth (collaborative filtering) minimize the noise down the tail

Research projects he's working on:

• Can the standard demand curve be impacted (change the slope) by the long tail? Millions of niches equal out the effects of big hits
• Does the long tail have fractional elements? Is the tail is made up of millions and millions of smaller tails? Do you see the same power law distribution in these small tails?
• How does price elasticity work in the tail? Should prices be lowered or increased down the tail? Maybe for entertainment you want lower prices down the tail (a want), information (a need) might raise prices down the tail
• Bottom of the pyramid theory. There are huge markets of people at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder. If you can create .10 cent products, you could tap into a massive new market
• Secondary markets. How does secondary markets (like used books) becoming more liquid (on Amazon) affect primary markets?

Paula Le Dieu, about media orgs like the BBC becoming massive
Massive media, competes with their audiences for attention. How is massive media responding to changes in the way people manage and interact with content? Compared Dr. Who leak (tried to cover it up) to how scifi handled Battlestar Galactica preview where fans could watch the entire first episode, uncut and with director's commentary.

BCC creative archive - BBC will not wrap DRM around any of their content, implement creative commons license, will eventually allow P2P for distribution, want to allow users to add meta data to programs. I'm really amazed at how forward thinking the BBC is as an organization in comparison to their American media counterparts.

JC Herz Tactical satalite (effectively Flickr for military satellite images)
Goal is for anyone in the military can access a tactical satellite (which is open) to see whatever they need. They can avoid going through the intelligence community to get information they need to do their job. About two dozen people coming together to build this satellite and system. Ability to zoom into a building and look around a room. Hard to describe the demos I saw aside from they were very impressive. Kind of like Keyhole on steroids.

Lawrence Lessig, creator of Creative Commons
Powerful entities are out there to stop what has always been, remixing. Stop with the obsession that there's something new. There's nothing new because cultures have always been made by remixing--taking what people have made in the past and remixing it (eg. Clinton remixed republican ideas and became pres, Apple did it with the iPod).

Humans remix, take and then share. The organic ways that people experience culture needs to be free. Examples: text (freedom to write), literacy (take the words of Hemmingway, Shakespeare, and you rewrite them for your school papers). Tarnation - produced his movie for $218 and inspired Canne but would cost him $400K to clear the writes for the music in the background. That's wrong.

When the tools change, do the freedoms change as well? If writing was available for us, will it be available in the future? A use equals a copy. A copy requires permission. What our society focuses on is punishing those who write with the tools of the 20th century. We either reform the laws or reform the technology. We can reform the technology. Stop reforming the machines and reform the law.

We're in a civil war. In the American Civil War, the South believed in property. In the North they believed in freedom. The same thing is happening with copywrite law today--us versus them (companies).

Very cool presentation. His powerpoints where synced as he spoke. Each slide maybe only had one or two words against a black back drop. Very effective way to deliver a powerful message.

Tidbits: They're porting the Creative Commons license internationally; what we have now (versus back during Napaster era) is we have two sides to this issue (north/south analogy) making a conversation possible; as it gets moved out internationally, the copywrite discussion will grow the discussion; free remix or control over copies is what copywrite law should be about.

Announced today. Google Code. Google's place for Open Source software.

Pretty cool Amazon web services app. Not terribly useful but a great example of how creative web UIs can get not tomorrow, but today. AmazType.

Yesterday, the morning session was hard to follow. Lots of small 15 minute presentations left me wanting more. But I think I'm getting used to it. The chance to see a bunch of topics in a short spurt was pretty cool.

All the speakers were great in the morning except for Nokia. I think the guy (their chief Java architect) used an old marketing presentation for his preso. He started off talking about mobile computing happening on "the edge" of networks. Little did we know that "the edge" was some fancy marketing poop from Nokia. He repeated it 100 times. People were making "the edge" jokes for the rest of the day. Notes here.

In a panel discussion on personal fabriciation, one of the panelists mentioned that library usage is falling across the county but they are the closest thing we have to a common community meeting place. Given the costs have fallen dramatically, why not open a fab lab in every library basement? Awesome idea. Notes here.

The 37Signals preso was preachy (on how to build web apps). There was quite a few skeptical questions from the crowd. Folks didn't buy things like "ignore scalability" and many thought his model resembled agile to a lot of folks. He lost me after saying functional specs don't matter. Ridiculous. Jason should have really said his talk was how to build simple web apps quickly and efficiently. From this perspective, his talk was great. That detail got lost in his presentation. I think it's the same preso he gives on the road to often largely non-technical people who want to learn how to build web apps. The talk needed adjusting for the very technical and savvy people at a conference like ETech. The one thing I did really like about his talk is how customer focused he was. All the structure in his dev model was to deliver great product to customers. That was cool. Notes here.

Somebody needs to figure out a wireless way to transmit power! Powerstips were hard to come by in the conference sessions. Where's our modern day Tesla?

In the morning there was a presentation by a guy building some open source administration tools for software that lets school use technology. Really neat to see folks doing something without trying to attract VC or get rich. Something given back to the community. Notes here.

Our vision is for a common information systems platform for school administration from California to Calcutta, via Cape Town! ... SchoolTool will not depend on a technology-intensive environment, but in those schools with broad and deep access to technology in the form of computers, laptops, PDA's, cellphones and wireless pagers...

One of the coolest sessions for me was some Perl hackers in the UK building detail pages for all politicians in parliment. They now get more hits than Google for British MPs (members of parliment). Seeing a grass roots movement like that have such a big impact on UK politics is inspiring. Notes here.

Stefan Magdalinski, civic activist
Thinks the net can be used to redistribute information away from special interest groups to all citizens. All the guys are a group of about a dozen Perl/Python hackers that wanted to make it easier for UK citizens to get plugged into government. Showed the English House of Commons site--way too complicating to get information. Wanted to make a better way to get information about MPs (members of Parliament).

They built TheyWorkForYou.com. They were originally hoping building the site would become a forcing function for the government to build something better. They used data, in theory, they didn't have legal right to access given British laws but they went ahead anyway. Brave!

Features on the site: highlight search terms in the document, annotate the document to translate parliamentary speak (which happens to be user created content), links directly to wikipedia. Turned a flat document more dynamic. They wanted documents to be open source and available via RSS so citizens could stay in tune with issues they cared about (eg, send me everything about fox hunting). You can track everything an MP is involved in. The detail page can track Technorati tags so you can track what other people are writing about a politician. They've effectively created MP (parliament memeber) detail pages. Example here.

Other random bits:

• They launched in June 2004
• They initially got threatened that they would get shut down by the government
• They're a group of all volunteers who do this in their free time
• The hard part of the project was processing the information. Source documents would comes in very messy feeds. They had to put together some clever ways to parse the information
• They launched the app by word of mouth
• Only used $3K donation to help one or two of their devs to pound out some work over a week taking time off from work.
• Had 200K users in March. They're doubling monthly. They are the top result for any MPs on Google
• Some MPs use their RSS feeds to generate the content for their blog. Funny.
• They believe that they'll be doing more traffic than the official parliamentary site within six months
• govtrack.us is a similar US version

Their vision--however obscure an issue, Brits can now find out how their MP voted on any issue. On any given day, any issue should get some scrutiny from the general eye balls in the public.

Jason Fried, 37Signals - How to build web apps:

• Reducing mass - need to find the right people (hiring). Need to work with people that are positive, well rounded (people need to be able to do a lot of different things), quick learner, trustworthy, good writers (so people can communicate effectively).
• Embracing constraints - forcing yourself into situations where you have to constrain is good. Like use small teams. Be self funded--you care about your own money, right? Lack of proximity--meetings are bad. You can be more productive working apart for periods of time. Building less software--build less features, allows less tech support, less qa, give people just enough to solve their own problems. One example is Tada lists (simple ToDo list manager). Other ideas: say no by default, listen to the product and add features when users ask for it, decisions are temporary you can always change them later.
• Getting real - There's an illusion of agreement. There's nothing functional about a functional spec. It's a political document. Allows people to point fingers at each other. Graphic design should drive your product development. Make most decisions just in time (JIT).
• Managing debt - Don't need to worry about scalability (when you start building your first web based app).

Joel Spolsky, Why does the iPod have 90% market share?
Presented a model he came up that differentiates products like the iPod or Herman Miller Aeron chair from other less successful.

• Make people happy
• Think about emotions
• Obsess over aesthetics

How to make people happy? Allow them to be in control of their environment. Think about Windows. Users hate when Windows makes you install a detected update. Why? Because they don't feel in control.

Think about emotions. Why do people feel safer in a sports utility vehicle? You feel more secure when you're high.

Aesthetics are ridiculously important. Take the iPod versus Creative. It's style versus features/cost. Style matters to people. Developers sometimes avoid having to think about style. Remember Winamp? It allowed users to create new skins to replace the default UI. That way, the developers didn't have to think about getting style right. What Joel was saying is that developers shouldn't think they are immune to aesthetics. Look at OS X--all kinds of drop shadows, colors, glitzy animations. People like decorations.

If there's one thing Joel wanted us to remember from the presentation was the concept of misattribution (or misinterpreting reactions). People will misattribute opinions due to heir feelings. If you make them feel happy, people will come away thinking positive about your product.

Joel got the biggest applause of any speaker yet at the conference. He's a good performer.

More BBC chaps presenting innovations in the BBC world
Given something, an identifier makes it addressable - then you can build structures and systems around it. Eg. barcodes, Amazon ASINs, postal codes. The BBC has 40K hours of national television broadcasts across eight TV stations, 76K hours of national radio broadcasts, 42 local radio stations, world service, BBC America.

What are PIPs (program information pages)? It's a system that represents all BBC programs on the web. They group programs by series (2nd episode of Friends from season 1). Logistical issues: how to you deal with schedule changes; BBC is a huge org ~30K people, legal issues. Episodes are their detail pages (eg. episode 1, friends).

The web product. Page for every episode of every program that the BBC creates. The Web structure is a simplified reflection of the data structure. Wanted to improve navigation between episodes. Every individual episode is uniquely identifiable and addressable forever. Sample was Radio 3. Schedules persistent forever. Over the next few years, expect to see all eighteen BBC national TV and radio networks becoming PIPs. Every program will have it's own unique identifier. Do I hear "customer who visited this program page also visited..." :-)

Few architecture tidbits. Electronic program data has no meta structure. Feed processing cleans up the data using various heuristics. SMEF is the data model they created at the BBC (open). They were hand wavy about what heuristics they used to handle authority issues (like actor, directors, etc).

Jon Bostrom, Nokia. Head of Java work at Nokia
Mobile Edge devices. The edges are interesting places. The center of the network isn't interesting. But at the edge you get emergent behavior. Ease of use is bringing the edge to average users. New management technology makes it easy to makes mobile phones work.

Current Nokia platforms: series 40 mass market java apps and content; series 60 rich content for Symban os; series 80 for enterprise devices. Java is being adopted a lot by the developer community for mobiles. Currently theres 350 million Java mobile devices on the market as of June 2004.

What's coming? Extend the Java platform. Take advantage of any wireless environment (automatic)--bluetooth, wifi, etc. Disconnected data sync--sync with whatever network you interact with. Make things happen via SMS (apps can receive and act on SMS events). Middleware services--automatically upload middleware to devices. Applications can send back admin information back to a server so admin can be transparent to users.

"The edge" keeps getting brought up. Not sure what that means exactly. Pretty marketing type presentation.

James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds
Problems around collective intelligence. In the last five years, there's been a lot of interest in collaboration (wiki, Linux, social software, google, delicioius). Large groups of people coming together to work on complex problems and solve them. All these movements have something in common. Not all forms of collective action are created equal. They can create worse solutions.

The idea behind the Wisdom of Crowds is by aggregating judgments, you come with a better outcome. This model works well if there is a true answer (if God could tell us the answer). Contrast this to Linux. A small number of people make the decision on what gets incorporated into the kernel. But lots of developers collaborate on submitting the best thing. With ants, you have lots of dumb agents running around, but they interact together to achieve stunning results. They're incredibly efficient at finding food. Ants do this by following very simple rules and pay attention to those around them. Interaction is the key to intelligence.

But human beings aren't ants. We don't have the biological programming in us to communicate collective intelligence. We have no equivalent in the human world. Eg. if there's too much interaction between humans, the dumber it's possible for us to become (because of group think). Human beings herd. We tend to stick to what others do (it's better to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally). Humans like the comfort of the crowd. Another things humans do is imitate. We're imitation machines. We do it to learn quickly. "If someone is doing something valuable, then other people should do it too." Economists call this an information cascade--once a cascade gets going, it's hard for one person not to do what everyone else does. When people don't think for themselves, then the group collectively gets dumber.

How can you have interaction without information cascades? Some things worth thinking about: 1) the ties you have should remain loose. Don't become tightly networked with other people. Loose ties minimize the influence of those around you have on you. 2) try to keep oneself exposed to as many perspectives as possible. Inserting randomness is important in the kind of information you're drawing on. Diversity is a good thing. This has interesting implications for the blogosphere and in orgnizations--you want groups to maintain communication cross hierarchies to maintain diversity.

"The crowd" only works right if the connections between everyone is different. Avoid a super tightly networked model. This was an excellent presentation. Not one power-point. ;-)

Clay Shirky Phone as platform.
It's growing and will allow some of the same creativy as the PC offered in the past . Presented some of his student's work:

• PacManhattan, a game played on the streets of Manhattan. Came out of a big games class--to mate the urban grid with the games grid. They used a phone for two way voice (surprisingly :-). Players in a control room sends instructions to players out in a field (the phone is in the game).
• Another phone based game called ConQwest.
• Dodgeball, a way to rate and describe sites in downtown NY. The mobile phone is the first item since keys were invented that everyone carries. It can be an incredible way to keep social networks up to date (versus something like Friendster which you set up once and forget about). Need social software that's embedded in our social life. The ex-girlfriend bug.
• Mobjects is about using bluetooth to communicate things between phones like emotions
• HeartBeat transmits SMS messages.

Tidbits - The phone is hardly fully used as a device. Only the minimum part of the platform is widespread - voice. Camera is the first tool other than SMS to get lots of usage. Even SMS is hard in the US. Not a lot of unique apps. Device manufacturers are unfamiliar with hacks so there's not lots of development happening. Server infrastructure is key for phones. The phone isn't a replacement for the PC, it augments the PC. Phone number is a universal foreign key.

Tom Hoffman , Tim Lauer talking about using wiki's in schools
Lauer started out that his school didn't have any server resources. They needed a way to store data on a server. Found Instiki, written in Ruby, can run on a machine. In there system, server data lives on teacher's iBooks. With Rendezvous, a browser points to a teacher's laptop running wiki software. Teacher can write notes to their students via the wiki. Students can upload their content and edit it on their teacher's computer. Noted that the solution was not supported by the school IT departement. Love it.

Principal took the idea from Hoffman's blog. Project SchoolTool is an open source project to create an administrative platform for schools. The ultimate goal is to create a tool that can be used in the developed world. Built on Zope 3. Architecture is extensible, customizable and hackable. SchoolBell 1.0 is their first big release. It's a calendar system build for organizations. Very inspiring presentation on someone trying to make the world better.

Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia
Freely licensed encyclopedia. Been around since Jan 2001. Currently have 500K articles. Taxonomy - have 350K categories. Hierarchical tree structure. More popular than NYT, Excite, Paypal, 500M page views monthly. 600-1000 people in Wikipedia do a vast majority of the work.

Original dream of the net was people sharing information freely. Worked for awhile. But there were problems: quality control (do authors know what they are talking about, people don't update often).

His solution is Wikicities.com. 170 communities formed in 3 months. Growing faster than Wikipeida did at the same stage of development. Conceived as the social computing successor to "free homepages," kind of similar to Geocities.

How do wiki's solve author fatigue? The site is managed by a community. What about quality control? Anything on the wiki is reviewed by peers (editors can easily see all changes inline--think the "tracking" feature in Word). Content is steadily improved over time. They don't have a a-prioir way of how things should be set up (like an enforced voting system). The community makes the rules.

Wikipedia is a social innovation. It will spread to other areas. Software which enables collaboration is the future of the net.

Discussion on folksonomies (Clay Shirky , Stewart Butterfield, Joshua Schachter, Jimmy Wales)
Why allow users to categorize? Creator of Del.ic.ious - first uses of a tag for him was a hash mark after a bookmark he stored in a text file which made it easy to grep for his favorites. Then he built a web UI to make it easy to tag and it grew from there.

Shirkey--people started using the comments field in del.ic.ous to have conversations around a link. Very interesting. Idea from the audience--is it possible for tags to be shared between different systems or collating tag sets? (Technorati, Flickr, Del,). Flickr has about 12M tags today. 200K tags at del.ic.ous but most are single uses. Need to tools to help users combine tags.

There are different tagging use cases--tag for yourself del/flickr, tag for others Technorati. Best way to solve the problem of unifying tagging systems would be to expose tags via APIs so others can remix their uses in new ways.

Tom Igoe, runs physical computing program at NYU.
He teaches a networked (physical) objects class. Goal is for students is to see the computer as a passthrough rather than the end point. Here's some examples his students built:

White Stone project. Two people have objects. You warm your object, a similar object in someone else pocket warms up.

Another project, Wifisense a purse that senses wifi networks.

Protest Button. It's a physical box with a button on it that allows protesters to at once send a denial of service attack to whoever they are protesting in front of.

Needies are stuffed animials that have MP3s built into them. They are plush toys that act like real people: jealous, needy, bitter, attention-seeking, and annoying. When one is feeling needy, others talk smack about it.

KU: a hardware app that communicates sadness.

Cory Doctorow
Ten year old CDs can be ripped, burned, made into ring tones, used in other ways. With ten year old DVDs all you can do is watch them. Can't save them to your HD, can't insert yourself with a video app into your favorite movie scene. If you want to build anything new in hollywood, approval to make a movie is made by a handful of people. But still DRM has not stopped infringement. These are 100% failure systems. Industry is out to control parasites in the system. But it will always fail. Cory read his talk so it was pretty hard to take notes. Luckily he posted it. Definitely recommended.

Neil Gershenfeld, from MIT on personal fabrication.
Talked about the upcoming digitalization of fabrication (of anything really). Talked about a class he started teaching called "how to build anything." He expected 10 students, 100 showed up begging to get in. Technical and non technical students. 20 years from now we'll make molecular assemblers.

Right now you can do a lot with $20K worth of hardware (laser cutter, electronics assembly, sign cutter, milling machine, microprogram controller, hardware workflows that allow all the machines to work together). In one project, made it possible for people right off the street to build things. Showed a video where they set up this lab in Ghana and kids went in to build things and wouldn't leave they were having so much fun. Talked about how business models need to scale to personal fabrication, personal VC that invest on the scale of thousands rather than millions. Cool idea.

Panel discussion (with Gershenfeld, Applied Minds, Squid Labs folks)
Problem with engineering is people have tried to formalize the creation process (with models, specs, CAD). Ready, fire, aim needs to be part of the process too. For example, physical models are better than CAD models. Why? Humans can interact with 3D things better than 2D. That's why Applied Minds starts their dev process from a prototype and then start iterating from there rather than a big planning process to finish with just a prototyp. Also mentioned was the importance of satisfying your patrons (investors, managers, etc.). You can do that by showing a constant quick stream of progress via prototypes. Keeps them happy and you working.

They also talked about setting up community fabrication labs where school kids can build anything they can imagine. Gershenfeld talked about how big orgnizations want to reduce risk. Even at MIT, the organization places lots of limitations on what people can build to reduce strain on resources. If there is no strain, imagine the innovations possible.

Back to the micro VC, every micro VC office should have a fab lab, so everyone in the local community can use it for free, and any good ideas that come out of it can get funded. Or why not have a $20K fab lab in the back of libraries as a public resource? That's a great idea!

Google labs launches an OS X dock like feature. Bet that was a project from a single engineer working in their allotted free time. Cool. [updated. By 5pm today, Google took it down. Perhaps Mr. Jobs didn't like this feature too much ;-)]

Justin F. Chapweske, The Swarming Web
HTTP hasn't changed much since the early days of the Internet. But it has it's warts. You need load balancers, routers, caches, fault tolerant servers, etc to be able to scale to run enterprise applications.

How about remixing HTTP? What happens when you want to send real big amounts of data over HTTP? To send a 1GB file, your chance of failure is 60%. You should be able to combine public available bandwidth into new bandwidth when you need it. Kind of like a RAID for IP. Swarming is like RAID but for web content.

Today - fault tolerant servers, then need load balancers to make sure that your system is always up. Expensive. Another option is Akamai (content delivery network). It's even more expensive. The poor mans version of Akamai is the mirror network (like mirrored downloads on SourceForge). What we need is self heal data transfer (if corruption occurs on data, it needs to be able to self heal immediately).

What is swarming content delivery? Popularized by BitTorrent. We need a new transport. An adhoc content delivery system. Self scaling. Extension to HTTP by headers. This concept will be ubiquitously deployed over the next several years (prediction). A good current trend - generating static files on systems that they can store easily on disk (CSS, RSS, Google Maps) which can be swarmed. Infro on SwaremStream here.

Random take aways from the first day of the conference:

• The BBC is cool. Young people really psyched to be working for a big company--unusual. Really allowing people to innovate seems to be the way to energize. OK, not a surprising insight. But it is surprising seeing it happen at a big company. Read the original session.
• The Salesforce.com session was made by a marketing chap. Nice enough guy but there was this air of suspicion surrounding his talk--a marketing guy can't be at the conference with good intentions! ;-) Original session.
• Macs are everywhere. Jfew mentioned that he never saw more people on Mac laptops than Windoz. Times are a change'n. Anecdotally I noticed lots of mac users using Firefox instead of Safari. Since Firefox launched with much fanfare, Safari doesn't look as critical of an app for Apple any longer. Wonder what they'll do long term?
• Coolest demo of the day was definitely Phonetags, from the BBC chaps. I must admit, I'm always impressed seeing companies share early technology like this. Yahoo's Tech Buzz game was a close second.
• Most disappointing talk was Google. Norvig just went over stuff already on the Google labs page. Strange given most of the type of people at this conference already know about all that stuff. His talk was equally uninteresting at Accelerating Change back in November. Wonder what's up? But the Yahoo talk was good. These talks here.
• Open source continues to amaze me. Today's related session was on adapting the open source model but for hardware. Another on open source TiVo. The main thing that impresses me about open source is how it's running rings around multi-billion companies and there's nothing they can do about it (including frivolous law suits). Love it.
• I heard a rumor that Ben bought a few Mini's. Maybe he might try to use iFrabricate to document that Mac Mini car hack? :-)

Presenters where from Squid labs, a hardware company. Talk was about how to create open source hardware. Take an open source car. Imagine if we had hobbyists who love working on their own cars and got them documenting the process like with say Linux? Hacking hardware is already in our blood.

People are already documenting how to build things on their own websites. Jetzilla as a fun example on how one guy figured out to make a jet engine from a Starbucks mug--part of amateur jet propulsion work. Another example, some hobbyists innovating around kite surfing. In that example they said they have people like Boeing engineers with fluid dynamics experience creating designs and collaborating.

iFabricate is their idea (a website) for creating open source hardware systems. It's a collaboration system, takes care of open source license registration, images, video, link to processes (think embedding text inline on your photos like on Flickr), a rating system to rank sub processes so you know which ones are optimal to implement, a way to see what you need to purchase to create the project. Their example project was how to build a toy open source helicopter. Real projects here. The transition electric scooter was shown. Very unique idea.

What is television? A collection of transports, a format involving synced picture and sound, an activity. Opening up distribution channels to any interested party is the goal. Original access issues: airwaves as public trust, multiplicity of voices--solutions public broadcasting, cable must carry laws, public access. low power licensees. Problems for emerging technologies: access to a dev environment, standards, cut cable operators in on revenues.

What's the solution to this? An open media platform. 1) need a set-top box (it's a low end PC, tuner card, NTSC output, software--linux, mozilla for middleware, Mplayer and Mplayer plug-in, digital content recorder). 2) need an electronic program guide (content and transport agnostic, user controlled, open to any interested party).

Problems with traditional iTV (because of latency, slow modem, weak browsers, interrupting "viewer experience").

Next up was a demo of their open media platform. Showed a Wahlberg movie (BoomTown) with a banner add pane imbedded into the TV window that displayed contextual information to what we were watching as scenes drove by (like buy the DVD from Amazon, soap ad someone was using in the shower, soundtrack issue, IMDB information, they called it "enhancement information.") This information could come down from an NBC or bittorrent feed. In another demo showed a sample documentary how to make an atomic bomb. In the middle of it, they let the user interact with multimedia content immediately on your TV versus pointing them to the website with it. The video triggers HTML/javascript. All this functionality they said could happen with exciting set box technology.

More information at posm.tv.

Presented by a bunch of BBC chaps. Importance of radio. 90% of reach among UK adults. Radio (in the UK) is starting to retake TV. Radio could be reemerging. BBC radio shows over 6M hours of radio programming per week. How will radio change? Radio is a broadcast model. How to get a return path though? SMS the way they tried.

The ten hour takoever. During 10 hours last year, users controlled a BBC record station (pop/disco station)--they told the station what to play by sending artist/track/dedication via SMS. It was a live experiment. Didn't really know what would happen but turned out to be a big success. 150K text messages requesting 6000 tracks.

How it worked. Needed to give DJs direct access to their listeners. They wanted the interaction to be two way. They put a web page that allowed users to see text messages as they were coming in in real time. Every ten seconds, the latest text messages went up on the BBC web site. There was a internal studio web UI that the DJ's interacted with.

Podcasting. BBC was one of the first broadcasters in the world to Podcast. Mentioned that there are a lot of small R&D teams all around the BBC. One of these teams built Podcasting features. R&D teams rapidly build and iterate on prototypes. Not long term focused like typical R&D teams.

Example project: Phonetags. Hear a song you like, bookmark it with your phone for later recall on your computer. From this data you get bubble-up metadata or spread meaning up the chain. Based on the things people tag, you can influence programming. That allows aggregation options for new navigation like Amazon style "customers who bought..."

Another idea: Group Listening. See what your friends are listening to, listening to programming alongside your friends in a shared space. Two people tune a radio together in a shared space (imagine two IM windows with some radio specific functionality). What does this do? It connects people to radio programming directly.

Larger questions. Why do we treat networked computers like passive, dumb receivers for broadcast content? And what happens when the network is in every appliance?

Adam Gross, Marketing, Salesforce.com
Salesforce.com, have 200K subscribers across 13K customers, sforce is their on demand web services API for enterprise customers.

What are applicatios? Generally, how we get computers to do useful things. Abstaction makes it easy for us to build apps. It would be most efficient to use assembly language but we don't because it's harder than other methods which abstract that complexity.

How we abstract stuff - 80's saw windowing with the Mac; 90-s with virtual machines (java, .Net); 00's with interpreted scripting languages like Perl, Python, PHP. Take HTML. It's insanely inefficient (wastes bandwidth but it doesn't matter anymore with Moore's Law), it's declarative (easy to use) proven by how many sites out in the world are HTML based versus com/VB or other app languages.

Utility computing: Web 2.0. Phase 1 - on demand web services eg. Sforce web service API is now responsible for 20% of salesforce.com activity (page requests); eBay API is responsible for 40% of listings. Phase 2 - on demand app dev (how you program a web site independent of any applications). One example is My Yahoo where you are creating an applications, what the analog for a enterprise app. Salesforce calls it a on-demand-stack.

Gave a demo where he changed the underlining data model of a Salesforce app by simply pointing and clicking via a web UI (very My Yahoo-esque). It's a declarative model. There's no procedural logic in place. This is really a set of abstractions above jsp and SQL. Allows people to build sophisticated applications without knowing anything about programming languages. The website is a platform.

Matt Jones & Chris Heathcote from Nokia
First came paper output, then the command line, then came WIMP (you have to learn what icons mean). Ubiquitous computing is here. Need to approach "the digital" from the physical standpoint. "We are situated. We can touch. We are embodied." What they're working on at Nokia is using touch, for example, to interact with the digital world. Push interactions back into the physical world rather than abstract actions in the digital world. Information is pushing us to our limits. Goals:

• We need to use our attention wisely (important information should just bubble up)
• Glancability
• Important information isn't in a window

Example devices. Tablet. Smart furniture. Digital pens. Sony Eyetoy. Force feedback joysticks.

A few related links: Near Near Future, Past & Viniger, Where the action is: The foundations of embodied interacction - Paul Dourhs - MIT Press.

George Dyson. Institute of Advanced Studies.
How the digital universe we work in emerged. John Von Neumann went to Los Alamos where the machines they built where originally used to calculate bomb stats. He concluded then that computers would be much more important and impact the world more than bombs.

Addresses, order codes, and/or, command line (to execute orders), shift registers, memory, first bit mapped pixels (graphics), no propriety rights to the things built, were all ideas that came from the group of researches that Van Neumann put together at the institute. He also had a pet project on artificial life which he brought people in to research (create virtual organisms). The first virus was made in a punch card. Human biology took 4B years to evolve. Digital life is happening much faster. The title wave of computation power will change the world (that's what Van Neumann and his other researches concluded in the 40s). Cool talk.

Kevin Kealy, AT&T Labs
SPAM is really self replicating organisms. Toothing (local area spamming for Bluetooth). SPIT - Spam of Internet telephony. The more hacks there are, the worse the network gets. AT&T labs is trying to do about things like this. Plumbing analogy--your public utility handles separating the good and bad that you consume or send through the plumbing of your house. They're effectively trying to create virtual bleach for the network. Later this year AT&T will throw away their firewalls to really start to develop and put their software through the ultimate test--protecting a real corporate network. The intelligence lives in the internal network to handle malware. More details from him will come in a talk later in the conference (that unfortunately I won't make).

Global conciseness. What is it? It's the thing that decided decaf coffee pots should be orange. Something Jeff mentioned W. Daniel Hillis once said. But that's not Jeff's talk.

A9.com demo. Vertical Search. Oops, Windows just crashed. Jeff has to reboot. :-) The idea is to zero in on relevant data. Example, do a medical search, your search should be in pubmed. Did a search for vioxx, clicked on different sidenav buttons to zero in on data. Jeff imagines eventually having thousands of vertical search options at A9. We want OpenSearch to do for search what RSS has done for content. A9 now makes it possible to syndicate search (OSRSS). Short talk (just about 10 minutes).

W. Daniel Hillis from Applied Minds. Talked about remixing technologies, science and art.

Showed some thing's they've built. A walking dinosaur. Robots (six legged, four legged - self balancing, a snake). Very cool video. First build a model/prototype. Doesn't really work well in simulation. Talked about the mix of disciplines at the company and how it enhances creativity (artists, astronaut, etc). Couldn't agree more. :-) They also do projects just for fun and then later use as bait for companies to build at a later point.

Showed a project working on treatments for cancer--a way to give a signature of every protein in the blood. If you can find out what made a cancer treatment work for a given blood type, you can target drugs more specifically to patients (project required disciplines from biology project, physics, pattern matching and other disciplines mixing together). In another project, showed a map project where you can physically interact with a digital map on a physical table. Way cooler than the recent Microsoft demo. Showed the next version of the map table that changes it's shape to show real three dimensional contours in the table of a elevations. Increadibly cool.

Where's the Internet headed? Shared databases where data can be shared across many different type of uses (publically available databases). Stated Amazon, Flickr as examples. Sharing and rendering public databases are a lot of the type of projects they are working on.

Microsoft Research up first
Unconventional innovations and cross discipline serendipity. Rick Rashid.

Harnessing human scale storage. We are getting to the point that we can store all information about a person (anything they interact in a given day). Take an image of everything you see during the day for example. They've built devices and are using them with memory loss patients for example. Privacy studies--how do people interact with devices like this in the public is another example. These are wearable devices. Another unconventional thing. What happens when you take a conventional things and turn them into surface computing. Showed some video on interacting with virtual objects on a standard table that's been turned into a input/output surface.

Head of Yahoo Research labs - Gary Flake
Next.yahoo.com pre-beta things. Showed Y!Q. Allows you to make contextual searches in context of what you were doing. They have about 30 scientists that work on things that fall in-between business unites. Work on machine learning, collective intelligence, scientific computing and text mining. They try to hedge their work (short term, mid, long term). Mentioned Yahoo Research Labs page. Introducing the Tech Buzz Game. To tap the collective wisdom of the Web. Get a single opinion, a single expert opinion, aggregating among non-experts, aggregation over population weighted by performance. Use markets as predictors (examples, Hollywood Stock Exchange for Box office , Iowa Electronic Markets for political questions). Allows people to manage a portfolio of things they know. Artificial market on questions related to emerging technology trends. Example. You guess what will drive search engine volume of OS X vs. OS X Tiger. How to time it? The prices of the two stocks reflect the aggregated opinion of which will dominate searches. By timing right, you can make fake money which allows you to invest it in other ways. You participate in collective prediction. Another announcement - Dynamic Pari-mutuel auction. Revolutionize auctions. Good talk.

Google up now - Peter Norvig, Director of Search quality
They treat all engineers as if they're researchers. labs.google.com. Want to improve the user interaction with a search engine--richer. First example is Google Suggest with auto completion. This was done by one engineer in his spare time during his day per week where he could work on anything he wants. Use XMLHTTP requests displayed in a DHTML layer. Also showed Google Maps. They break up the map into little images. When you drag the map, they redraw fast. Searches are done in iFrames. Showed Google personalization. Google Sets. Interestingly, not much new content from Norvig.

Brandon Eich. Using web technologies to build desktop apps. NPAPI (inline plug-ins) a way to avoid ActiveX scripting. Worked on it with Sun, Apple, Macromedia (others except for M$). They have a simple C code API to extend the browser. XUL overlays. Add arvitrary new elements to UI. Showed a couple favorite plug-ins: Grease Monkeys. Bugmenot. FireFox 1.1 coming out mid year. He was a last minute presenter for someone else so this talk was a bit disappointing. Looks like he didn't have any time to prepare. But looks like a real interesting guy.

Steward Butterfield from Flickr.
Core idea of Flickr is for people to be able to show and display their photos. Introduced Flickr at last year's O'Reilly ETech. Flickr API currently has 62 methods. They often release methods before features using them appear on the Flickr website. What did they get out of releasing the API? Trust, utility, discipline (code to their own API), credibility, creativity (give people a sense of ownership in helping blaze new trails, also create a community). Downside? Lost control of scalability, operation headaches, have to deal with other people's bugs (some programmers aren't that good--for example making API requests 500 times per second), copyright issues. Some demos:

• FlickrFox Sidebar
• Flickr Postcard
• FlickrGraph - find flickr contacts and show social network
• 43Things - Can how your photos easily on 43things
• Flickr World Map
• Mappr - see photos tagged all over the country

They get 250k API requests per day. 100/sec at peak. About 4-5% of traffic is API requests. Interesting to see how web applications grow over the next ten years. The talk was super short so Stewart really didn't have time to give any insights about companies using web services in general. But still interesting.

Rael Dornfest starts off the conference on introducing Mass amaterurization. Made a note about Clay shirky's thoughts. His introduction was mostly talking about how the hacker is moving away from just tech circles.

Tim O'Reilly is up right now to talk about things on the radar of their company. Patterns they're noticing--The idea of design patterns to internet applications. What are design patterns?

Each pattern is a three-part rule , which expresses a relation between a certain context, a problem and a solution. Christoper Alexander

On today's web, you no longer need to build all components of your system. Therefore: glue together the small pieces of others. Everything is about smaller releases. Don't package up new features into monolithic releases; rather fold them in on a regular basis as part of the user experience. Engage your users as realtime testers and instrument such that you know how new features are being used (examples: flickr, Google, del.icios.us, Amazon). Del is an example of always in beta--it's an ongoing experiment.

Users add value to shared data. Open Source has become the lingua franca of the Internet. Invite your users to participate. Customer reviews at Amazon given as an example. BTW, heard "Amazon" mentioned at least a dozen times so far. It's a love fest. ;-) Another example is flickr's tagging (reflection of a user created database).

Only a small percentage of users will go to the trouble of explicitly adding value. Therefore, make participation the default, aggregating user data as a side-effect of them using your application. ie. default settings for flickr is "public" which creates the network effect.

The long tail. Many of the limiting factors from the physical world are absent on the Internet. Therefore: use the power of the computer to monetize niches formerly too small to be commercial.

Software above the level of a single device. The PC is no longer the only access point for networked apps. Therefore design apps from the get-go to access Internet services. iSync an example. Across all your devices, all your data is shared. Don't design for a single device anymore. You have to design for all devices that connect to the network.

Architect your apps to tap into the social network.

Data is the next "Intel Inside" Apps are increasingly data-driven. Owning data creates future Intel's (the gold is in the data).

Packets and shipping containers. As demonstrated by container shipping, IP packages, and HTML pages, a standard content agnostic packet is the most effective way to ship both goods and data. Understand the optimum "packet size" for your application domain and devise processes that fit it. What's the ideal packet size for my apps?

Remix. When content is digital, it lends itself to being broken down and remixed. Therefore: Bid your business model so as to make your living from the smallest atomic unit. Music industry as an example.

Other things on their radar:

• Ajax. Use JavaScript as a way to build rich internet apps (Google Maps example). Jon Udell walking tour of New Hamshire example.
• Hardware hacking. Make, Fabbing, Networked Objects, car PC hacks.
• Ruby On Rails. One little line of code gets you easy access to databases for example.
• Data Visualization. Flickr color wheel. Baby name wizard.
• Voice-over-IP. Skype. Allows sharing in a new way.
• People. The "P" in P2P is People. Wisdom of Crowds.

Man, after only about two weeks from launching my new blog, it's nearly the top search result on Google. Impressive. AG

I'll be hanging with "the Few" [no blog to link to!!] and "the Benson" down at ETech this Tuesday-Thursday. Should be a fun time. I'll be trying to do the same thing at this conference as I did at Accelerating Change back in November. I'll be blogging all my sessions. Look for "ETech" in article titles. It was super valuable as record keeping vehicle. I still go back to those notes from time to time. Be forwarded, since I'll be typing at warp speed, the posts won't be too readable. But you should be able to get the basic gist.

I recently purchased the soundtrack to My Architect. There's an interesting audio excerpt from something Louis kahn said about art. Pretty interesting (.mp4)

New features to Google local:

We've scoured the Web to find local business info like store hours, restaurant menus, prices and wifi availability; added a separate section with color-coded editorial and user reviews; and thrown interactive Google Maps into the mix

Pretty cool. I tried a few searches. One for the Elysian. Another for Vivace's. Nifty.

You have to wonder why Apple didn't build something like this in the first place for Airport Express. Probably big evil media companies doings.

Airfoil lets you send any audio to remote speakers attached to your AirPort Express. AirPort Express - It's not just for iTunes anymore.

The first few things I got set up on the new blog was getting the Flickr blog post CSS cleaned up so it works correctly. The default code they provided worked 90% OK but needed some tweaking. I'm excited to start posting photos and sharing thoughts on photography (a hobby I really want to start engaging more in 2005). More on that in a later post. Next I made sure to make comments appear line in posts. I hate it when I visit a blog and miss some cool conversation around a post because I missed the tiny "Comments (3)" type text at the end of an article. So, be wise when you leave comments on my blog. :-)

What's next? I want the blog to give a good picture about whatever my interests are at the moment. Here's some ideas of things I could imagine in my sidebar: flickr badge, latest del.ic.ious booksmarks, latest items added to my Amazon wishlist, latest news stories I'm reading via Findory, goals I'm working on via 43Things, latest music I'm listening to, latest books I'm reading, latest movies I've seen, maybe even top programs in my TiVo queue and of course a blog roll. The key is doing no work to update the content on my blog meaning the content needs to be self updating from other sources via web services or whatever. I'll post a note whenever I add something new.

Amazon introduced the notion of the Your About You page back in 1999. I guess this is effectively my about me page. Fun stuff.

On Sunday I road my first Chilly Hilly. It's a biking event where you ride around Bainbridge Island (about 32 miles). I road past the Opalka residence. Wish I knew that so I could have met up with him. Didn't want to stop unannounced. Anyway, this was my first chance for a real ride on my new road bike. My lord I didn't realize how important getting a bike fitting was to making for a real enjoyable ride. The guys at R&E are absolute pros. They spent over an hour fine tuning the bike to me. Never again shall I ride out of a bike shop without a real bike fitting.

Next biking events for me are the MS Mountain Bike Challenge in June and the Tour de Whidbey in September (a 100 miler).