April 15, 2004 Howard Rheingold - ?Mobile Communications, Pervasive Computing, and Collective Action? - Video.
Joi Ito's Web: Inba Standard Time: "I've spent the last few days hanging out at home holding down the fort while Mizuka has been busy with other stuff. I'm still adjusting to the local time zone. It is primarily an agricultural area so everyone goes to bed at 8 pm and wakes up at 5 or 6 am."
List of videoblogs:
Vog 2.0: MIT experimental video blog.
Video Link Japan: Japanese video blogging.
Demandmedia: collaborative video blog. Various formats of movies.
Vidblogs: "Vidblogs are films. They usually are between one and six minutes and contain lots of "real" footage from someone's life. Vidblogging is the ultimate public voyer experiment." Onetrick.net (New York video blog: little movies per week, very good.)
That's it for now. Videoblogs take time to watch!
After a few minutes of browsing Managing Wholes, I like it. I like practical sites with a mission.
ACM Queue - A Conversation with Matt Wells - When it comes to competing in the search engine arena, IS bigger always better?: "What I think really brought Google into the spotlight was its index size, speed, and dynamically generated summaries. Those were Google's winning points and still are till this day, not PageRank."
BloggerCon:: "Condoleezza Rice's testimony before the 9-11 commission was watched by millions around the globe, as are many events of worldwide importance that are broadcast live. This is television at it's best. Broadcast infrastructure like that of CNN enables a centralized global distribution of information that well justifies it's cost. The internet cannot compete with this model for live events. Imagine millions of people worldwide firing up a live stream to a video server. Even if the load could be effectively distributed, somebody has to pay the bandwidth bill which increases with each additional viewer. In contrast, television's revenue increases with each additional viewer
Now think of the 6 o'clock newscast. While millions tune in simultaneously to watch the same information at the same moment, and even though the news anchor is presenting (reading) the news live, all the elements were ready prior to the broadcast. The weather report was probably prepared an hour ahead of time. The local human interest piece was edited two days ago and put in the show's rundown because it's a 'slow news day'.
[...]
At this very moment, desktop tools have an entire 'media literate' generation creating audio and video content that is bursting to be free from their harddrives."
Absolutely. Why couldn't I, through my distributed delivery, see Bush's speech the next day, edited, with commentary by some of the thinkers I respect? One day I will, and that day is approaching fast.
Have a blog?
Inspired by the page 23 meme, a little mindshare research test. I will attempt to analyze and report later.
1. Think about "Colombia".
2. List the 5 first things that pop up in your head.
3. Put them on your blog, together with these instructions.
Mine: Maria, Medellin, Drugs, Mountains, Sun.
Community shared agriculture in Canada, Montreal. I just did a new one page website for friends - brochureware right now. Give them a li'l Google push and link to them!
"In this case, the intermediate relative is the father."
1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
Doing a little ego-surfing on Amazon's new search site, I found out I was being mentioned in a book on usability.
The new Amazon search site has the unique advantage of adding search in a book. I really like the way they did the UI: you can open/close a sidebar with book search results. Nice.
More discussion on Amazon's new search site: John Battelle (insightful comments on Google vs. Amazon), News.com.
I am rereading Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind, and I was wondering: has anyone researched folk categorizations of the internet? You know when you do user research and people talk about the internet in terms that sound simplistic? Has anyone researched those terms and categories? For example, insight in the category "website" might help to explain in how far people distinguish between "websites" they're on. I've seen many people follow links to other websites not even realizing they are actually on another website.
Lou asks why there is so little interaction between IA and KM. Good question, and one that can be extended to other fields.
Michael's starting page for his 2 year-old. I like the idea.
Behind the Scenes at News Aggregator Topix.Net: "In 1998 we did a project called NewHoo, which was acquired by Netscape/AOL, and is now called the Open Directory Project (ODP). It used a massive group of volunteers to build the web's largest human-edited directory. The ODP now has 60,000 volunteer editors, and the data powers Google Directory.
Our team left Netscape/AOL in 2002, and rather than using human labor again, we wanted to explore emerging AI (artificial intelligence) techniques for classifying and extracting structured data from the web. The goal for Topix.net is to make a web page about everything -- every person, place, and thing in the world -- constantly machine-summarized from the Internet." Topix.net
Ask Tony Archive -- CMSWatch: "I have been analyzing [Vendor 1], [Vendor 2], [Vendor 3], and [Vendor 4] -- all XML-based vendors -- as content management solutions for our university. We also have a university portal we would like the systems to publish to.
From my interaction I am starting to feel that [Vendor 1] the best solution for our university given that we have under $100k to spend and the fact that we do not need a lot of the features that an "ECM" solution offers currently. Do you think this is the correct choice?"
Tony says assemble a team. Good. Then he says "have them prioritize selection criteria". Sounds good, but the danger is the selection criteria will be a list of features and some requirements about the vendor. Not good. The best approach I heard of came from DonnaM: they had that team come up with a set of practical scenarios, and then used those scenarios to select a CMS. That feels like a winning approach.
The Morning News - Reality's Apprentice: a fascinating New York story of reality shows, blackouts and more.
PHP Comes of Age - SitePoint PHP Blog. Harry Fuecks is my PHP guru, and he blogs on Sitepoint (as does Simon Willison): "Oracle (yes Oracle) have an interesting article up titled PHP Comes of Age which reflects on PHP's past and makes some insightful observations on "Culture Clash", PHP being, in many ways, a meeting point for programmers of many backgrounds." It's part of Oracle's series The Hitchhiker's Guide to PHP, with articles by Rasmus Lerdorf and other PHP heavyweights.
A UML Introduction Tutorial Information Architects need to learn object modeling, and UML is as good a place to start as any. This tutorial seems pretty good.
SemErgence: What Sucks About PlanetRDF.org: "My problem with planetrdf.com is that it syndicates all posts from blogs it has chosen, instead of those posts that deal only with RDF and the semweb."
Exactly what XFML can be used for :) But I like PlanetRDF just the way it is.
IntellectRPD is another prototyping tool (like Ubiquity RP) that generates documentation. Could be useful for Information Architects.
Veepers seems to let you take a simple picture (of, say, a salesperson), and a text file, and it generates audio and an animated video version of that picture that realistically blinks eyes, moves head and mouth and such. Creepy, but cost effective! They have a great logo, too.
All we need at hand, already. Go! | Metafilter: "There may be no single, organic and living font of solutions to many of the world's most pressing problems than Curitiba (previous link from Wikipedia, and a bit more of a wonkish summary here), a Brazilian city of 1.5 million that urban planners from around the globe make pilgrimages to, to learn."
Google plans trademark gambit | CNET News.com: "What's new: Google plans to remove limits on sales of trademarks in its popular keyword advertising service. Bottom line: The move signals Google's increasingly aggressive posture in defending its primary source of revenue, according to some legal experts, who call the plan a gamble."
By the way, I love CNET News' What's New/Bottom Line box for high impact stories. I love the fact that they identify high impact stories as such. CNET News actually doesn't just follow Jakob's old writing for the web rules, they improve on them.
Simon Willison: A myriad of markup systems: "It's hard to avoid the legions of custom markup systems out there these days. Every Wiki has it's own syntactical quirks, while packages like Markdown, Textile, BBCode (in dozens of variants), reStructuredText offer easy ways of hooking markup conversion in to existing applications. When it comes to being totally over-implemented and infuratingly inconsistent, markup systems are rapidly catching up with template packages."
Onfolio Products Overview: "Onfolio is a PC application for collecting, organizing and sharing information you find online. Fully integrated with Microsoft Internet Explorer and Office, Onfolio has tools for capturing a wide range of content including links, text snippets, images, web pages, and documents. Onfolio lets you organize and find captured content quickly and easily. And with Onfolio, you can easily share your research in documents, presentations, emails, and research reports."
Looks like a "blog this" bookmarklet on enough steroids to have become a client side app.
The difference with a blog is that it lets you download pages in collections and search them. It also lets you create webpages, RSS feeds and other types of documents from your collections. I'm going to stick with my blog though.
640KB ought to be enough for anyone: "In each case, the designer encountered requirements that made it difficult to build their application on top of standard relational databases or file systems. And in each case, the designer ended up saying "now that we've invested in this framework, let's offer it as a platform so that other developers can plug in their own modules and custom schemas, and a powerful ecosystem will naturally emerge!" But it hasn't happened."
BBC NEWS | Europe | Translating is EU's new boom industry: "When 10 new countries join the European Union on 1 May, they bring with them an extra nine languages to add to the EU's existing 11. Translators, builders and electronics suppliers are busy ahead of 1 May
There could even be 10 new tongues, for if Greek and Turkish Cypriots vote for reunification before then, Turkish will become the EU's 21st language. How will it cope? Even with 20, Europe's tower of Babel is creaking. Twenty languages gives a total of 190 possible combinations (English-German, French-Czech, Finnish-Portuguese, etc), and finding any human being who speaks, for example, both Greek and Estonian or Slovene and Lithuanian is well-nigh impossible."
Follow up post at Languagehat. One possible outcome of all this is that Europe will become the world leader in translation services. Another is that the EU will go down in flames when translation costs soar beyond its means. More: "My theory, which is mine, is that the best way to deal with this problem would be to set up a hereditary caste/guild of translators with branches in each EU country. Childrens born into the guild would be circulated around guild-run boarding schools in a suitable selection of countries to acquire native speaker aptitude while the acquiring is good. "
New mailing list: Techie Librarians: "Discussions about the creation and nature of taxonomies, ontologies, the Semantic Web, RDF, Information Architecture, Knowledge Management, Thesaurus building, XML, Schemas, OWL, Topic Maps, controlled vocabularies, authority control, data management, and much more. You do not have to be a very technical person to understand and participate in this list, you must though, be familiar with cataloging terms and how to manage information (good librarian skills)."
BBC NEWS | Technology | Workers find voice on the net: "A leafy suburb of north London may seem an unlikely spot for an international radio station devoted to workers' rights.
But it is home to Radio LabourStart, which is using the internet to broadcast reports on the plight of workers around the world."
Online radio will obviously never replace real radio, which can reach millions of people with hardly any bandwidth scaling issues. But niche online radio can take advantage of that other property of the internet: it's global. A niche online radiostation can have a small to medium large audience, and go where normal radio could never reach.
Labels seek end to 99c music per song download | The Register: "The Wall Street Journal reports that the major five labels think that 99 cents per song is too cheap, and are discussing a price hike that would increase the tariff to $1.25 up to $2.99 per song."
Hahahahahahahaha!
Cover Pages: TMAPI 1.0 Alpha Release: Common Topic Map Application Programming Interface.: "The goal of TMAPI is "to allow developers to learn and use just one programming API for work with any topic map processing engine."
Gmail accessibility [dive into mark]: "The only way to use Gmail is the way that the Gmail designers use Gmail. The only way Gmail could be less accessible is if the entire site were built in Flash."
InterWikiMarkupLanguage (IWML): finally: ""InterWikiMarkupLanguage, intended to capture an interoperable subset of common wiki functionality. It is not meant to support everything that any wiki syntax is capable of representing, it is for reliable interchange between wiki systems."
We need this, I'm glad someone is tackling it.
Yahoo! Groups - Groups Abuse: I can't seem to access Yahoo's feedback forms. Everytime I click a link to contact them I get an error page. Anyone?
Doing subtitles in Vegas: Export the audio of your movie, get this free subtitling tool, subtitle, save subtitle file, install a plugin and import the subtitle file like this. (I haven't tried this out yet.)
Another First-Time Filmmaker (11/99).
Sound is by far the most technically complex aspect of the documentary, at least for me. We used an excellent shotgun mike. I plugged it in the wrong hole a few times, and for some tracks, for some strange reason I haven't been able to figure out, the sound was recorded mono (not stereo) and too loud. It doesn't sound good. I'll try to figure out a way to reduce it's volume while making it sound better.
$14 Steadycam: build your own steadycam.
On a related note, I've started editing the Colombian documentary using Vegas 4.0 on my $800 Windows XP computer (+ $160 external 160 Gig harddrive).
I've already uploaded 3 hours of video in my project and Vegas hasn't flinched. I was worried about being able to edit 20 hours of video on my cheap machine, but now I feel confident. I love Vegas.
I skimmed through the manual today on the train (for about 1 hour), and I think I know everything I need to now. The interface is remarkably easy to learn, because everything maps to easy to visualize real-life metaphors.
One thing I'm trying to figure out that the manual didn't talk about much is how to organize all that video while editing. I created a "temp" track where I park stuff temporarily, a "final" track that should contain the final edit, and a track for each of my 23 tapes (so I can easily refer to my printed log that shows all the scenes on each tape with notes).
Vegas lets you add notes and stuff, but even after only having 2 tapes (2 hours) of video on their tracks and taking out cuts and moving them into the final track, I'm getting confused on how to manage this.
I am cutting out cuts of their track and moving them into the "final" track so I know which cuts I already used. I can then look at the tape 7 track for example and see if there's anything else in there (not yet cut out) that should make it into the final track. I think this will work.
I also created a "filler" track: images of mountains and roads and nature and such that can be used as filler pretty much anywhere in the documentary - as opposed to cuts of action or interviews that need a specific place.
Any ideas on organizing this stuff in while editing are very welcome!
Big Fractal Tangle: the deal with don: "Ten years ago today, I signed away 51% of my second software company, Gravity Systems Inc, to a businessman with an incredibly deep gravely voice named Don Van Natta.
[...]
Aside from my plasma trips, I made cash developing a custom estimation package for Don's mechanical contracting company. My plan was to make and market "Vienna Estimator" to plumbers, electricians, and HVAC shops, then use those profits to fund my Gravity & Colony dreams. That was mistake #1, resulting in me spending three years writing plumbing software instead of riding the wave like the Netscapes of the world."
Grammar [dive into mark]: "Also, a snide note from a grammar nazi who took umbrage with the sentence 'There is a zen to it which I am not one with.'"
Grammar nazi's are sad. They, like, really miss the point of language altogether, all while professing they love language. Ay! Study linguistics, not grammar, dudes!
Note: The Anti-Worm Guys Don't Like "Financial Sustainability" in a Development Context: Archive Entry From Brad DeLong's Webjournal: "While sustainability is certainly a desirable goal, it may be difficult to achieve. Teaching people to fish rather than providing fish is great if it works, but this method works only if the donor knows more about fishing in the local area than the people who live there, and only if the donor can transfer this knowledge."
The Shifted Librarian: "My parents just got back from two weeks in Belgium and environs. When we talked on the phone tonight, the very first thing they both described was not the beauty of the land, how expensive things were (Euro against the dollar), or even the chocolate. No, the one thing they wanted to talk about first - and which obviously had a quite an impact on them - was the ubiquity of cell phones in that area."
I had a cut in my head sown a month ago, and it healed very nicely, but there's a little thread sticking out of my head. Aren't those supposed to just fall out?
Some thoughts on Drupal, an excellent open source community system. I've played with it for over 6 months now, and am using it on a live site. It's not perfect though (is anything ever perfect?)
1. Good code. Drupal, as opposed to, say, PHPNuke, contains good code. The developers continually attempt to keep the codebase clean and modular. The Drupal culture is a coders' culture.
A very nice advantage of this approach is that there are many modules available that extend Drupal's functionality. It is hard to figure out which module is up to date and being maintained, and it's hard to figure out exactly what a module does until you install it, but those are small problems that I'm sure the Drupal team will fix soon.
A disadvantage of Drupal's coders culture, is that features are sometimes coders toys instead of what users really need. For example, the "remember me" feature still doesn't work well, and was removed from the latest version. Big mistake for a community site! On the other hand, you can request features, and offer to pay for them (which is great).
Still, all in all, the approach works. The problems mentioned above are fixable.
2. Limited templating. The templating system of Drupal is built with the purpose of letting an admin user customize their site through their browser interface. By clicking some checkboxes, you can customize navigation, and add "blocks" to your site. However, this means less support for easy template coding.
Drupal uses 1 file for your template (as opposed to a separate file for each section of your site, like Moveabletype does). This means that, if your entire site has the same structure to it, you're fine. If you want different parts of your site to look differently, you end up coding a lot of PHP.
A second problem with the template file is that it is full of php code. There is no clean separation using tags, like most template engines use. The template file uses functions. This means that, to customize the template beyond small html changes, css changes and what you can do in the admin section, you will be coding PHP. Bad. In my opinion, this part of Drupal needs an overhaul.
There is a Smarty wrapper available, but until that becomes the standard (and until you can use multiple templates for different sections of your site), my complaint stands.
If you're a Drupal coder: I know you can do anything with Drupal. That's not what matters. It's about how easy it is to do things out of the box, and how easy things are to customize with limited understanding of PHP and Drupal's architecture.
Multiple languages.
It is possible to provide multiple languages for the templates of Drupal (the text that lets you sign up and such), but the "nodes" (the basic content container of Drupal) do not provide the ability to have multiple language versions of an article (for example).
There are some modules that try to address this problem, but until Drupal provides a standard, out of the box facility to have multiple language versions of an article (including translation facilities), Drupal only partially supports multiple languages out of the box.
Scaling of the UI.
Like many open source CMS's, Drupal needs to think about how it approaches growing websites. Out of the box, the system is optimized for medium size websites. There are too many options, too many pages, and many things take too many steps. Drupal should be optimized for small websites, and allow scaling the UI and functionality to medium and large scale websites. But start with small - that's how most of your users will start.
Overall, I think the Drupal team needs to focus on the basics. Drupal is at a level of maturity now where it is more important to improve basic usability and functionality (like the install process, which they are improving) than to come up with more new and exciting functionality.
If they improve their focus on improving basic functionality and usability, Drupal can become a real standard CMS. If they don't, it risks to become a feature bloated open source CMS as there are already dozens if not hundreds on the market.
IBM Usability: Role by phase matrix
AlterNet: Globalization vs. Americanization: "I grew up a patriotic South Vietnamese living in Vietnam during the war. I remember singing the national anthem, swearing my allegiance to the flag, and promising my soul and body to protect the land and its sacred rice fields and rivers. Wide-eyed child that I was, I believed every word.
But then the war ended and I, along with my family (and eventually a couple of million other Vietnamese), betrayed our agrarian ethos and land-bound sentiments by fleeing overseas to lead a very different life.
Almost three decades later, I make a living traveling between East Asia and the United States of America as an American journalist and writer. My relatives, once all concentrated in Saigon, are scattered across three continents, speaking three and four other languages, becoming citizens of several different countries. Once sedentary and communal and bound by a singular sense of geography, we are now bona fide cosmopolitans who, when we get online or meet in person, still marvel at the difference between our past and our highly mobile if intricately complex present."
Fast Company | Fresh Start 2002: Weird Ideas That Work: "Personally, I think failure stinks. But the fact is, every bit of evidence demonstrates that it is impossible to generate a few good ideas without generating a lot of bad ideas."