CSFB - Thought Leader Forum: "The Amoeba dubia has 690 billion letters of gene code in it. We only have 3.2 billion letters of gene code. It's 200 times the size of ours but still based on four letters. You can code binary code into life code: A=00, T=01, C=10, G=11. This becomes the science of bioinformatics. The amoeba only needs 1 billion letters to live. The rest is storage space. You can store every copy of the New York Times ever printed on a couple of amoebas. And they can reproduce. That's what a nanocomputer looks like."

How to make a documentary

Related posts:

1. How to make a documentary
2. Logging the documentary
3. Editing the documentary
4. All the posts about documentary making and the Colombian documentary

I am leaving tomorrow morning to Colombia to make my first documentary film ever. I always wanted to make a documentary. I'll be using a little consumer digital mini-DV camera (a Sony DCR-PC120BT, around $800). I bought it six months ago, and I've made a few small movies of friends and stuff to practice since. Here's an overview of what I've learnt so far:

1. Image quality (lens, resolution) of a consumer camera is good enough for this documentary. It looks fine played back on a television.
2. How I film it has a big impact on the perceived image quality. Use a tripod for many shots. Be aware of lightning.
3. Showing the visual evidence is more important for a documentary than shooting pretty shots.
4. Hold that shot! First lesson not to look like an amateur: hold that shot. Don't start zooming, panning and so on if not absolutely necessary. This was a hard lesson but I think I've got it.
5. Sound is the hardest thing to get right. As long as you point your camera in the right direction and your battery is ok and you have enough film, you'll get decent visuals. But sound is very hard to get right, and if you get bad sound there is no way to get it good again. I bought a small $70 Sony shotgun mike that goes on the camera, but that didn't really produce good sound either, so we borrowed a professional shotgun mike from a friend. The mike's bigger than the camera. This may sound a bit exagerated, but it's necessary. The mike in the camera (and even the outside mike I bought) just suck to the point of the sound being unusable.
6. Editing on the computer is easy. I am using Vegas 4.0.
7. When you're finally doing the shoot, you don't want technical problems. So I bought a backup battery and lots of tapes. I'll start a new tape at every shoot, even if the previous tape was only half full.
8. It's nice to shoot little scenes that can complete other scenes (for example when you have a part that's not usable because it's out of focus).
9. You can't know exactly how the documentary will work out before doing it. (At least, I don't).
10. You should watch what you filmed every evening to get a feel for what you've got, and where the documentary is going.

Me and my girlfriend have found a way of working for interviews and such that seems to work: she asks the questions and points the mike, and I film and listen to the headphones to make sure the sound's ok. We practices a little bit - I'll report back on how it worked out. We are going to film for about a week. Until then.

Google searches this site is on page one for:
- matrix reviews (5th)
- ethnography (7th)
- metaphors (6th)
- verizon wireless sucks (a proud 1st)

A long-living family archive website

This page inspired me to start a new project for this year: a family archive website.

It is a website where my extended family can post pictures and information, and the idea is that it will be a long-living site: I am shooting for 100+ years - that seems certainly feasible, the technology (HTML + HTTP + ...) seems stable enough.

I expect this site to go through cycles of activity and non-activity. I like to imagine a great-grandchild discovering it, after it hasn't been updated for decades, and getting fascinated with the facts and pictures posted there.

So I'm making some design decisions that will make that kind of lifespan feasible. Comments on these decisions are very much appreciated:

1. Plain HTML only, using HTML transitional 4.01 and CSS. Use basic set of semantically useful tags, and allow only updating of the stylesheet for changes in the look (I'm not sure about this one). No server side functionality like PHP or Perl. No database.

2. Passwords and server information stored with a variety of family members.

3. A scalable and easy-to understand (and updateable) IA. For now, it looks like this: (all thoroughly cross-linked, but implemented as static HTML):
- home
-- about this site
-- years (a list of years we have information on, in reverse order. There are also decade overview pages.)
--- individual year (or decade) page (each with text and links for all the information we have for that year, like who got married, and links to information and people)
-- people (a list of people, organized in family trees)
--- individual person (contact info if any and links to years and information).
-- information (a list of all the content (that's not people or years) that has been added to the website, organized by year it was added.)
--- individual information piece (a page or website, including all relevant files, that presents information about the family. For example, a photo album, or a description of an event.)

4. This website is not the place for experimentation - just plain uploading of information and cross-linking. There will be a sub-domain where family members can request their own free websites where they can do whatever they want (start blogs, ...).

Comments or experiences with similar projects welcome!

The Benetech Initiative: "The BeneBlog is a weblog by Benetech CEO Jim Fruchterman, on issues and ideas that affect the application of technology to unmet social needs."

A little self-promotion: the revived ethnograpy wiki.

William Denton wrote a paper called How to Make a Faceted Classification and Put It On the Web, illustrated with a rather refreshing example (no wine this time): dish detergents.

Jim Moore's cybernetics, politics, emergence, etc.: "Blogs have a special social relevance because they allow their bloggers to create and maintain a network of weak social ties."

XML.com: Making Web Services Work at Amazon [Dec. 09, 2003]: "only about 15% of Amazon web services calls are made with SOAP, the remainder with REST."

A great promotional use of Flash for Creative Commons: Reticulum Rex.

Tipping - a method for optimizing compensation for intellectual property. Good article for my outboard brain.

WorldChanging: Another World Is Here: Pentiums and Penicillin: "The BBC has been running a series of articles on how the spread of technology is helping redefine development in the poorer parts of the world."

Jim Moore's cybernetics, politics, emergence, etc. : Home Page: "To win we must find more and more ways to deepen the support that online organizing provides for face-to-face community. Face-to-face meetings generate and feed the intimate daily personal communication networks that help people stand up to the media-driven information assaults that currently define politics as usual. Face-to-face community involves identifying local people who share your values, obtaining social permission to get together and talk politics, sharing information and developing understanding, and taking meaningful personal action to play a part in a larger political whole."

With my apologies for linking to everything Worldchanging writes, but this blog is my outboard brain.

WorldChanging: Another World Is Here: In Defense of Global Capitalism: "Johan Norberg, a Swedish author with roots in the anarchist left, has written In Defense of Global Capitalism, a rebuttal of the anti-globalization movement, arguing that global capitalism is necessary to improve conditions in developing countries."

WorldChanging: Another World Is Here: Worldwatch on the Tech Bloom: "Worldwatch - the thinktank of record on all matters sustainable - says that cellphones and cheap computers are revolutionizing the developing world and helping bridge the global gap between rich and poor."

WorldChanging: Another World Is Here: G20 and the WTO: "The New York Times today took the rare step of devoting its entire editorial column to a single issue: the need for the developed world to make concessions on eliminating subsidies (especially for agriculture) if world trade is to continue to grow more open."

WorldChanging: Another World Is Here: Kaospilots: "From their homebase in Aarhus, Denmark founded almost 8 years ago, the Kaospilot school provides an exciting and radically different education which is hands-on, internationally orientated and focused on social entrepreneurship and leadership."

- Top Yahoo! Searches 2003
- 2003 Year-end Google Zeitgeist
- The Lycos 50 2003 top 100

Happy 2004! Let's start with some Library Juice: "To set up a book on a shelf is no doubt a very simple matter, yet it involves something more than the mere placing of the volume on the shelf."

eclectic librarian: West v. Ranganathan: "Jessamyn West pointed out today that she has her own Google/dmoz category. Not only that, but she has more links in her category than Ranganathan."

Andrew writes a good overview of XML-based UI description schemes.

I suddenly got a whole bunch of invitations for LinkedIn, a social networking site focussed on bussiness. It's fascinating. I have been wishing for a way to manage my contacts (the people I kinda know and would like to stay in touch with), and this might help. I will report back in a year.

So I don't get this: Jon Udell:

"Let's suppose Kathy, the department administrator, reminds Frank, the CIO, that Paul, the marketing guy, is way overdue for a PC upgrade. Frank pushes back: the budget is tight and something's got to give. So Paul negotiates a deal: he'll give up the DVD burner if he still have the flatscreen he asked for. But since Paul is in marketing, and he does sometimes have to burn DVDs, Frank tacks a DVD burner on to the upgrade order for Marcia, who's also in marketing. But the deal is that Marcia will have to share that DVD burner with Paul.

Today this contextual narrative is mostly scattered across a bunch of different email inboxes. It never finds its way into the operational database, although it would be great if it did. That way, the next CIO might have a shot at sorting out the environment that she inherits from Frank. But there's more than archaeology at stake here. Documents, including the purchase order and the messages related to it, aren't just passive carriers of information. They're the warp on which we weave a socially constructed reality. Somehow, we need to find ways to connect that reality to the workflow and process orchestration systems now being invented."

I totally agree that we socially construct reality. But it's done socially - not by mining some metadata about a conversation held months or years ago. The new manager Jon mentions will talk (email/chat/IM/...) to Katy or Paul, and construct an understanding from those conversations. He will not get that understanding from researching the metadata trail left by earlier conversations.

It seems to me that Jon's statement: "Somehow, we need to find ways to connect that reality to the workflow and process orchestration systems now being invented.", misses the ball. The workflow and process orchestration systems need to take that reality into account, allow for it, ideally even encourage it. But that is a function of the way interaction with those systems is structured (Do the systems force you to do your job one way? Do the systems allow you to construct your own ways of interacting with the people involved?), not something more metadata that can then be mined will solve.

(via Tanya) Toward a General Relation Browser: A GUI for Information Architects (PDF). Nice GUI ideas for browsing large amounts of information. I'm working on a corporate portal right now and I could use something like this.

Dean for America Feeds: cutting edge tech for the Dean campaign (Dean is running for president in the US. Anything better than Bush I say).

Makes me think of the possibilities for NGO's. From what I've seen, almost none of the NGO's have much technical sophistication in their use of internet technologies. Some sites are pretty decent (good content), but almost all lack basics like RSS, and few take advantage of the net's capabilities to connect people.

I'm thinking of writing something for NGO's about the potential of the internet for their various missions, with plenty of examples. Any pointers to NGO's (or grassroots organizations) making efficient use of the net and new technologies like RDF, RSS and such are very welcome (especially if the NGO is working outside of the US).

Danny Ayers (via Doc Searls): Raw: QuestionGarland and the w6 vocabulary. It takes doing actual classification (not just examples) to get (like Danny does) that, unless the rewards are really huge, classification (creating metadata) has to be easy.

The ugly underbelly of the web

The longer I work with large corporate intranets, the more I am amazed at how ugly they are. Ugly in that special Internet sense: they use unusual authentication schemes, have plain weird URL design, the list goes on. I particularly find the URL design annoying: in an intranet redesign, you're often required to recombine existing stuff, but if pages don't have unique URL's you're kinda stuck. What was ever wrong with giving every destination page a unique URL?

Jon Udell: The LinkedIn dilemma: "I'm bugged by forms that invite or require me to specify the unspecifiable." Or in other words: categories that describe the world in too limited ways. Sometimes (often?), categorizing isn't the answer.

If you need to do an easy local install of Apache, PHP and Mysql on your computer running Windows XP, I can highly recommend AppServ Open Project. I ran the installer, and it just worked (I tried the XAMPP installer before that and that didn't work).

Lou on Enterprise IA as Intellectual Property.

Simon points to XML in PHP5: An in-depth look into advanced XML features. Very cool - I can't wait.

The Belkin Media Reader for iPod would be perfect for traveling: it lets you store pictures from mediacards on your iPod. But it doesn't work with my older iPod! Arg! Any ideas anyone?

Object Learning: Big-time publishing fun with metadata...: "Harper's is built upon a Semantic Web framework - albeit a primitive one."

XFN: Introduction and Examples Nice. (via Tanya) We're getting down how to create these languages (should I call this a language????). I feel like we've reached some kind of stage in the semantic web: we can now create these languages in a variety of ways. Which ones will survive? How will the patchwork turn out?

Jon's Radio: use style to get people to create metadata. See also here: "There is, for example, a widespread—I won’t say “delusion,” though I think it is—impression that markup is difficult or time-consuming to author. [...] I think this is largely an artifact of how we have thus far been forced to author markup."

Widgetopia: Christina reviews UI widgets.

Discriminating? Yes. Discriminatory? No.: "I defend the morality of decisions by categories and by generalizations," he writes.' Interesting reading for people interested in the morality of categorization. The article has some intriguing ideas on the value of temporality in categorizations. Anyone know where I can learn more about this?

The Spectator.co.uk: "Africa isn't dying of Aids - The headline figures are horrible: almost 30 million Africans have HIV/Aids. But, says Rian Malan, the figures are computer-generated estimates and they appear grotesquely exaggerated when set against population statistics." Let's hope so.

Nice design!

Through the Eyes of Children:
"Through the Eyes of Children began as a photographic workshop in 2000, conceived by photographer, David Jiranek, and inspired by the founder of the Imbabazi Orphanage, Rosamond Carr - an American woman living in Rwanda for over 50 years. Using disposable cameras, the children originally took pictures for themselves and to share with others, exploring their community, and finding beauty as the country struggles to rebuild. "

SAP, Microsoft draw battle lines: M$ is starting the battle with SAP for enterprise applications. The article doesn't mention that SAP depends on IE (their software runs pretty much only on IE), and the advantage that that gives M$. SAP's software is stretching the limits of browser capabilities (they have drag and drop with DHTML and such) - this is going to be an obvious advantage for M$ when they start developing these apps: they can build whatever functionality they want straight in IE. They can also achieve close integration with Office.

a n t e n n a: "It's actually surprising given how data and context rich emails are that email clients have lagged behind photo and audio file browsers in the sophistication of their classification schemes." Indeed. More goodies here.

WorldChanging: Another World Is Here: Redistributing the Future: "Open source: we pay a lot of attention to it here, so much so that several worldchangers have asked why. Outside of the realm of computing, they ask, what does collaborative software have to do with changing the world? With sustainability? With democracy? With justice?"

Ooh. The IA Summit 2004 has Brenda Laurel as the plenary speaker. Ethnography enthusiasts must attend!

If you use an RSS reader, you loose track of weblogs that don't do RSS. Victor has been writing about how to develop an interface that lets many business users create or populate taxonomies, and specifically about the difference between the backend taxonomy and the taxonomy that ends up being shown on the website, what he calls "display hierarchy" (he can't seem to stop coining terms, which means he must be going where not many have gone before!

Victor: "OK, you've got a taxonomy full of info you want a whole bunch of distributed, internal, business users to manage and a website that displays that taxonomy, but in a very particular way crafted to the needs of customers and controlled by a centralized web group because you don't want to simply display the raw taxonomy cause that sucks for navigation much of the time, and somehow you must do the taxonomy dance to tweak how the taxonomy content flows into pages."

Internet Explorer Vulnerability: so now looking at the URL and scrolling all the way right (to catch the @ character) isn't safe anymore either.

The Beer Topicmap

Ah, a category debate! On the Geography of the Bloggies....

Let me humbly provide a few categorization guidelines:

- The discussion is inherently political, so don't even try to propose a categorization scheme and state that it is more correct.
- Having a category for Africa (which has few webloggers) means promoting webloggers in Africa.
- The amount of bloggers per region is a good guideline to divide regions if you believe everyone should have an equal change to win an award.
- Categories based on population size really don't make sense.
- Self categorization is the best solution to deciding if a blog is "Asian" (say) as long as the definition of "Asian" isn't clear. This vague definition and the self-categorization is not necessarily problematic.

Bugzilla bug 39149: "It's a users choice." That's such a typical dumb programmers response it makes me want to shout at the guy (with all due respect for his undoubtedly hard work and excellent code).

The Importance of Good Copy: "One of the interesting things about direct mail is that it's quite easy to measure success rates. For instance in most campaigns they will send out 2 or more versions and then see which produces the best results. This has lead direct mail copywriters to get very good a writing copy that sells."

In the comments, a link to this (it turns out) classic of direkt marketing copy, which is discussed here.

One of the things I never quite got was the gap between direkt marketers and the other marketers. I guess it's cultural, I just don't get exactly how it works.