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May
4
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I'm a sucker for new technology and I've heard people raving about Twitter over the last couple of months so I though I'd give it a spin. I'm not quite sure I really get it yet - it's basically an IM log combined with a blog - ie. you're publishing rather than conversing with an individual (as is the case with IM). I'm pixelfodder if you want to know what I'm up to - I should warn you - I lead a boring, sedentary life 
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May
1
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I've got more Joost invitations - first 5 comments get them.
Note - your mail address won't show up or be shared with anyone other than Joost.
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May
1
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Here's an idea.
I'm a fan of delicious and tagging in general but unfortunately a lot of content I'm interesting in doesn't find me while I'm surfing the web - I actually still read books, magazines, billboards, watch TV and listen to the radio. The following happens to me a lot - I see an interesting book review; make a mental note to buy it then forget about it - ditto for tunes, films and virtually any product you can imagine. I'm sure I'm not the only person with the short term memory problem. But the people that really have the problem are the companies that are trying to sell those products - every time the above scenario plays out (and I'm sure it does a million times a day) - a potential lead turns cold and a sale is lost or at least delayed.
Imagine a service where all you had to do was remember a short word or alpha-numeric identifier and you could use mail, SMS, the web, the phone to register the things you're interested in. The identifiers could be categorized (ie. radio, print, tv, billboard, etc.) to keep the namespaces smaller and therefore restrict the size of the identifiers easier to remember; avoid errors, etc.. Those identifiers then appear in you delicious queue of tagged items so you can re-categorize them or research them further.
For example - I see a film poster on a billboard - I remember the Identifier ZZG238 for as long as it takes to send an SMS mesage - and I add the context / categories "billboard" "film". When I get home - I connect to the tagging service and see the identifier has been found and resolved and it gives me further options - buy, search, queue, etc. Very simple. There's margin for error - sometimes I'll get the identifier wrong but the context should allow for error correction or allow me to resolve the ambiguity - ie. ZZ?238 - did you mean song or hairspray ? The SMS route can also provide additional context - ie. when and where.
I did see a demo from (HP I think) that used a camera phone to scan a kind of barcode - but that limits you to thing you can see and a fairly close for long enough to take a picture - so it's pretty limited.
Or I could carry a notebook and pen with me at all times 
What do you think - is anyone working on this ? I'd happily be a beta customer
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Mar
30
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Last week I was at O'Reilly ETech in San Diego; it was a good show, but not great - I'll get to that later.
Anyway, here are my day by day notes - I'm doing this mainly as an aid for my own memory but also for anyone else who cares. So, here's the first day's notes, also see Part 2 and Part 3.
Day one (Monday) was the O'Reilly Radar Executive Briefing. The focus of the morning was on-demand and user-driven manufacturing. Colin Bullhap, one of the designers of OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) explained the evolution of the hand charged power supply used in the OLPC - every week they get fully formed prototypes to play with. Think agile manufacturing.
Chumby is a web-enabled clock-radio that you can hack; the blueprints are freely downloadable from Chumby Industries - open source hardware and software. You can hack Chumby in a number of ways - with a compiler or with some fabric and a glue gun.
Threadless really pushes the custom manufacturing envelope; they make cool t-shirts as well. The idea is anyone can submit a t-shirt design (a GIF plus some words) - if yours is selected (by community vote) then they'll manufacture it and pay you. So thy only create what there is demand for and they only create enough to satisfy the demand - as a result - they've sold out of every single product they've produced - that's pretty lean. Who knows - maybe cars will be designed (OK, maybe options packages selected) like this one day.
Seth Goldstein talked about his new service attentv.com - basically people can watch what you are surfing. My immediate reaction was - Uh ? But when I think about it - there's huge demand for watching people go about their daily lives, reading about what they're doing - so hey, why not. Ultimately there could be real demand from marketers - ie. "Subscribing to Me" - imagine how much a marketer could learn by not only subscribing to your click-stream and your TV remote - but maybe tracking you physically - tracking where your eyes wander when your walking through the store. How much would you charge for people to subscribe to your "attention stream" ?
Jeff Jonas from IBM is an interesting character and a great presenter - but you have to keep up; he moves fast; skipping from subject to subject - "identity analytics", "enterprise amnesia", "anonymized data spaces". I made notes but will probably have to go do some additional research to make sense of them.
There we're a couple of talks on energy and data center economics - it's all about location - finding the balance between land availability, infrastructure, power costs and the source and consumers of the data.
There was an all too brief demo of FreeBase - a structured database (consolidation) that can be easily edited by anyone - a kind of semantic web meets crowd sourcing. The idea is that content can be tagged and categorized and additional structured data slurped in as a result of the categorization. This is an area I need to invest more time in and managed to tap the presenter (Robert Cook) for a demo account. Thanks, Robert - hopefully I'll have more to share when I get time to play.
There was a session on Wall Street and Web 2.0 but I completely zoned out - I've no recollection what it was about.
The closing keynote on Monday was pretty cool - I saw my first Mathemagician - a very irregular guy named Arthur Benjamin. He's America's foremost Math Whiz and pulls some pretty amazing Math stunts in real time; better yet he took time to explain how he does it so you can get some insight into how his brain works; suffice to say it doesn't work like mine.
After a break - I attended the EFF BOF - there was lively discussion and I learned a lot - so much I decided to lend my support to the cause and join.
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Mar
23
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Last night I had a really quick play with Joost (and before you ask - I've already given away my invites). The user interface absolutely rocks (it makes YouTube look a bit 1990's). What with converting to Mac OS X and all the new eye candy that involves; my poor brain is getting overloaded. The content on Joost aint all that bad either - clearly it's more about quality content than YouTube (I've nothing against Chinese-frat Boyzone impersenators - but you can only take so much of that). Joost seems to be after a different segment - it'll be interesting to see how they get on. Oh and by the way - looks like they're a Sun customer. Did I mention the Joost UI - it completely Rocks.
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Mar
18
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I've got 2 Joost memberships to give away to the first 2 people to leave a comment. Joost is a p2p, streaming video service.
Note - your mail address won't show up or be shared with anyone other than Joost.
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Feb
8
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I saw some rumours about Yahoo Pipes last week - it went live last night.
Though I haven't had time for more than a cursory look, I have a feeling that this could be pretty important. And I think it has relevance way beyond creating custom news feeds.
If you're familiar with Unix Pipes (eg. "who | sort") you'll grok Yahoo Pipes. Just replace processes with URLs, Feeds, Applications on the Web.
I did have a quick play with the browser-based tool (which is pretty sweet) but I didn't get very far - looks like Yahoo's servers are getting hit hard. They clearly need some of these
As an example (trivial) use-case, a while back - I wanted to create a unified feed of the build / news feeds from a bunch of java.net projects. Pipes would let you create this pipe in a couple of minutes. When Yahoo servers catch-up - I'll give it a try.
Read more about Pipes on Dave Johnson's blog, Tech Crunch and O'Reilly Radar.
Update - I just tried hitting the service again and get "Our Pipes are clogged! We've called the plumbers!" - too funny. Seriously guys - get some of these.
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Jan
23
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Via Alexis, I just read Eve's posting about how a bunch of like-minded individuals are exploring ways to converge OpenID and SAML / Liberty. Liberty is often seen as a bit "Enterprisey" but has solved some tough problems; OpenID has a more user-centric design center making it a pretty good fit for today's user-centric web. From my 50,000ft view I think something good will come from this collaboration.
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Jan
22
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This is too funny. I'd buy a t-shirt if all my money wasn't tied up in Linden Dollars
Update - I just surfed on over to the guy who created this one-page parody and read this post - I'm so glad common sense and good humour prevail from time to time. Hey, he lives in Vancouver - I'm headed up there tomorrow - small world.
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Jan
15
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According to the Mozilla wiki - the next major version of Firefox (due the end of this year) will support both OpenID and Microsoft's Cardspace. The wiki doesn't explain exactly how OpenID (or Cardspace) will be integrated or more importantly what the user experience will be - which is what I'm really interested in (as a user). It will be interesting to see if Mozilla support will increase the adoption of OpenID.
For me, Id. Management built in to the browser is a big deal and I'll probably be looking at some of the beta builds to see how it evolves. Getting the user-experience right will be important if Mozilla really want this to compete with Cardspace (which looks very slick, IMO).
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Dec
15
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You know it's not business as usual when your legal department sends out legal guidelines for working in virtual worlds (ie. Second Life) - that's precisely what I just found in my inbox - and it was very interesting (and amusing) reading. On the same subject - Tim O'Reilly wrote about his virtual^2 experiences at a recent Sun press conference. I also heard that IBM already has some land in Second Life - interestingly mimicking their Almaden Labs (a stone's throw from my [real] home) and they're building more - is this a land grab or what ?
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Dec
8
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For most - access to the web is a far off prospect as it mainly includes a PC and a Web Browser. The way to get the web to more people (IMO) isn't through sub-$100 laptops and micro-browsers in PDA / Call Phones or set top boxes. I think we need to take the web to the people, not bring the people to the web. To do that - delivery of content has to be made way more consumer-oriented. Don't think Desktop or Webtop widgets - think Fridge Magnets, Art, picture frames, billboards, bathrooms. Imagine a Fridge Magnet that takes an Atom/RSS feed of the weather forecast, A bathroom mirror that displays my news feed and stock quotes, a picture frame that accesses my Flickr image stream. They don't have to be one way either - they need to interact to provide feedback. The technology is getting small enough and cheap enough and WiFi, Bluetooth, GSM are starting to cover the planet.
So, who's making the next gen. fridge magnet ?
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Dec
4
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WebVan is often used as the poster-child of failed web1.0 enterprise - they burned through hundreds of millions in VC funding buying Aerons, CISCO switch gear, Sun servers and advertising. Despite sitting some of their employees in the best chairs known to humanity - they still went belly up in 2001.
But hold on and fast forward to 2006 - I keep seeing Safeway.com grocery vans - they seem to be everywhere. In fact when my son was born - we used Safeway.com for a couple of months to lessen the household burden. So, while WebVan couldn't make it as a standalone business - seems that Safeway.com has used the same model to their competitive advantage.
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Dec
3
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I just noticed TechCrunch uses Snap - a little JS trick to allow you to get a kind of PiP (BiB?) view of a link - seems to work pretty well. Go on try it - float over one of the links in this entry.
