- Buckets and Vessels (Aaron Straup Cope) — amazing collection of projects and the cultural shifts they illustrate. Michal Migurski’s Walking Papers, software designed to round-trip paper and digital edits to Open Street Map, has recently been used by professors at the University of California’s Berkeley’s School of Information to enable “a sort of psychogeographical dispute resolution between high school students in the town of Richmond marking up maps of their school and neighbourhood with tags like “stoners”, “asian gangsters” or “make-out spot” (http://groups.ischool.berkeley.edu/papermaps/kennedy.html). By allowing participants to manipulate the perception of their environment they are given a sort of bias knob to adjust the psychics and gravity of one space over another and to create a truly personal map of the world. (via auchmill on Twitter)
- Jonathan Ive on Industrial Design — fascinating to hear him talk about how he approaches his products; the interplay between materials, manufacturing methods, and function.
- Hacking Toy EEGs (MindHacks) — who doesn’t want to do this, just based on the title alone?
- Mamet’s Memo to the Writers — forceful, clear, and commanding. A tremendous insight, in a short period of time, into what good writing is. No idea why it’s in all caps. SOMEONE HAS TO MAKE THE SCENE DRAMATIC. IT IS NOT THE ACTORS JOB (THE ACTORS JOB IS TO BE TRUTHFUL). IT IS NOT THE DIRECTORS JOB. HIS OR HER JOB IS TO FILM IT STRAIGHTFORWARDLY AND REMIND THE ACTORS TO TALK FAST. IT IS YOUR JOB. (via Dan Meyer)
"web2.0" entries
Four short links: 16 April 2010
Deep Web Projects, Industrial Design, EEG Hacking, On Writing
Four short links: 24 March 2010
Goat Economics, Android Tablets, In-Browser Annotation, Rational Security Rejection
- The Great Hargeisa Goat Bubble — hilarious economics parable.
- The ZenPad — look for more Android-powered tablets. (via azaaza on Twitter)
- Diigo — browser plugin to archive, highlight, and annotate web pages, then share and collaborate on those augmentations. (via an annotation of Zittrain’s Future of the Internet and How to Stop It)
- So Long, And No Thanks for the Externalities: The Rational Rejection of Security Advice by Users (Microsoft, PDF) — To make this concrete, consider an exploit that affects 1% of users annually, and they waste 10 hours clearing up when they become victims. Any security advice should place a daily burden of no more than 10/(365 * 100) hours or 0.98 seconds per user in order to reduce rather than increase the amount of user time consumed. This generated the profound irony that much security advice … does more harm than good. (via Greg Linden)
Web 2.0 Expo NYC CFP is Open Plus Webcast For Submission Tips This Week
The Web 2.0 Expo is returning to NYC this fall for a third year. The Call For Proposals (CFP) opens today and will remain so until 4/12/10. We are accepting talk proposals aimed at developers, designers, marketers and business folks. We are looking for Sarah Milstein and I will be returning as co-Chairs. After the CFP closes we will…
Launchpad SF Submissions Are Open Until 3/31
Startups! The Web 2.0 Expo is in two months. We want to highlight your work. Each year we put five of you onstage in a Launchpad session. The deadline for submitting your company is 3/31. The criteria is below. Entrants do not need to launch their company or a major product/service to qualify. All proposals will be reviewed before…
SkyHook and SimpleGeo Present SpotRank, Now You Can Always Find Where The People Are
In an under-appreciated announcement Skyhook Wireless released a huge set of location trend data. SpotRank, as the data is called, shares out ranking trends for locations around the world. The maps above show the SpotRanks of those locations. Skyhook has been collecting look-ups for the past five years. CEO Ted Morgan shared these stats "We average about 300 million…
Global Ignite Week: Starts Monday with 65 Cities, 6 Continents, 500 Speakers over 5 Days
From March 1-5 there will be ~65 Ignite events happening around the world. Ignite is an opportunity for geeks to share their passions and ideas with local peers. Each speaker gets 20 slides that each auto-advance after 15 seconds for a total of just 5 minutes. The result is bite-size chunks of information that inform the crowd on new topics. There are lots of Ignite videos online.
Four short links: 11 February 2010
USB Monitors, Presentation Secrets, Upload Widget, Government Data Flood
- Mimo Monitors — USB-powered external monitors for your laptop or desktop, and you can daisy-chain them for multiple external monitors. Opens the possibility of task-specific monitors (one for chat, one for email, one for shell, one for code, …). Monitors are 7″ (800×480) and there’s even a touchscreen option. (via James Duncan)
- The Secrets of Malcolm Gladwell — how to give a talk like Malcolm Gladwell. A short read and interesting. (via thestrategist)
- Plupload — a nice widget to handle file uploads (drag’n’drop, resizing, etc.). Has backends for Flash, Gears, HTML5, Silverlight, and Yahoo’s BrowserPlus, selects the best that’s available. (via Simon Willison)
- The Coming Data Flood (Sunlight Labs) — Three and a half years after their launch of data.dc.gov They’re looking at incredible exponential growth. Last year they saw more than a doubling of new datasets being released. It isn’t crazy to suspect we’ll see the same exponential curve of data growth coming out of the federal government and other municipalities as they follow suit.
Our Future World: Freedom (and Daemon)
I just read FreedomTM the second and latest book in the Daniel Suarez's Daemon series. It was a fun, thought-provoking read and I recommend it to any technologist or sci-fi junkie (it would also make a nice Christmas gift for your favorite conspiracy theorist). This review will focus primarily on the technology of FreedomTM, but I recommend that you…
Haiti: OSM and Sat Imagery for Free iPhone App
Crisis Mappers from around the world have been working around the clock to create maps and other tools for relief workers in Haiti. The earthquake caused tremendous damage to the road network and updated maps are necessary to enable food and volunteers to traverse the island. A free iPhone app with maps of Haiti has been released to the App Store. Jeffrey Johnson worked with a small company, TrailBehind, Inc., to adapt the company’s existing
( offline mapping app, Gaia GPS,) to provide offline maps to relief workers. It combines Digital Globe (.5m resolution), GeoEye (.5m resolution updated on 1/13), and OpenStreetMap (constantly being updated).
What Company Will Be the eHarmony of Microblogging?
A New York Times article by David Carr rehashing common knowledge on "why Twitter will endure" got me thinking about the ways in which it will not endure, or the ways in which it may endure via which no one will really care about it. So, what does it mean to "endure"? To stay in business? So what – Lord and Taylor is still in business, but there are so many better stores if you ask me. RC Cola has endured. We always think of Coke and Pepsi when we think of soft drinks, and maybe now we even think of carbonated things like Perrier or some sports drinks. But, still, RC Cola endures. Classmates.com is still enduring – but when was the last time anyone cared? So what does it mean to say that Twitter will endure?