DocBug

52-card Psycho 

There are exactly 52 playing cards in a standard deck. There are also exactly 52 shots in the famous shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock's movie Psycho. From this amazing coincidence comes 52 Card Psycho, a new augmented-reality experimental film piece my brother recently designed in collaboration with the Future Cinema Lab at York University:

52 Card Psycho is an installation-based investigation into cinematic structures and interactive cinema viewership; the concept is simple: a deck of 52 cards, each printed with a unique identifier, are replaced in the subject's view by the 52 individual shots that make up Hitchcock's famous shower scene in Psycho. The cards can be manipulated by the viewer: stacked, dealt, arranged in their original order or re-composed in different configurations, creating spreads of time, and allowing a material interaction with the 'cinema screen'— an object which normally is removed and exalted, and unchangeable in its linearity.

New York Times is developing an API 

This may be old news, but it looks like the New York Times is developing an API for accessing their content:

The goal, according to Aron Pilhofer, editor of interactive news, is to "make the NYT programmable. Everything we produce should be organized data."

Once the API is complete, the Times' internal developers will use it to build platforms to organize all the structured data such as events listings, restaurants reviews, recipes, etc. They will offer a key to programmers, developers and others who are interested in mashing-up various data sets on the site. "The plan is definitely to open [the code] up," Frons said. "How far we don't know."

Pilhofer and Frons both declined to give any specific dates, but Pilhofer said the API itself will be done "within a matter of weeks." In the next six months, "we'll have some of the major pieces — a restaurant guide, weekend events listings and books," Frons added.

(Link by way of the IdeaLab Blog.)

Kindle playing the game backwards? 

My coworker Steve Savitzky has some interesting musings on the Kindle, Amazon's new ebook reader:

If you want everyone else's opinion, see the links after the cut. Here's mine: interesting play, but it's in the wrong game.

You see, Kindle is Amazon's attempt at an iPod for books. They're using what they hope is an elegant, convenient, and reasonably-priced piece of hardware (which I'd guess that they're selling at pretty close to cost when you factor in the pre-paid data plan) to sell digital copies of books (which are fairly expensive considering all the atoms they don't have to handle compared with their dead-tree counterparts).

Apple, on the other hand, is using convenient access to an extensive collection of audio tracks (which they sell at pretty close to cost) to sell a particularly elegant and convenient, but overpriced, piece of hardware. Apple isn't even in the hardware business, really: they understand that they're in the fashion business, and have made it really easy for other companies to sell accessories for iPods.

Hands up, who's going to build fashion accessories for the Kindle? Don't all speak at once... How many people are going to buy a Kindle for each of their kids? Is anybody going to let their kids loose on a piece of hardware that lets them buy books at $10/pop at the click of a button? That's what I thought.

Sounds pretty spot-on to me...

Wikis in Plain English 

Having trouble explaining what a wiki is to your mom or tech-impaired coworker? Try showing them this 4-minute "Wikis in Plain English" video from CommonCraft. (The've also got quick "Plain English" guides on New Light Bulbs, Social Bookmarking, Social Networking and, just in time for Halloween, Zombies.)

(Thanks to KB for the link.)

Have you seen this man? 

The picture on the left is cropped from an image of a man sexually abusing children in Vietnam and Cambodia in 2002 or 2003. The face was digitally scrambled, and the image posted to the Net along with about 200 others. The picture on the right is the same picture, digitally unscrambled by Germany's federal police. Interpol has posted four unscrambled images of the man's face on their website, and have asked the public at large for help in identifying him. They've already reportedly received hundreds of tips.

That part's pretty cool, and I hope they catch the guy, but I have some trepidation at the idea of casting such a wide net using just a few photographs. Say you know somebody who looks remarkably like this guy -- maybe that creepy guy you see on the subway every morning. How likely is it that he really is they guy they're looking for?

If you were looking for a local criminal, say someone who robbed the neighborhood 7-11, it would probably be pretty likely you'd found the right guy. After all, it's pretty darned rare for two unrelated people to look so similar that even after close inspection you mistake one for another. The trouble is, even a very rare event becomes extremely likely when you're sampling the entire world: if there's only a one-in-a-hundred-million chance that two randomly-chosen people look really similar, then every person on the planet has approximately 67 doppelgangers running around. It's not that we can't distinguish between those one-in-a-hundred-million pairs, it's just that our brains only specialize our ability to recognize things as far as necessary. That's why people from another part of the world "all look alike" until you actually start to live with them, and why it becomes trivial to distinguish between 'identical' twins once you've known them for a couple months. But nobody's brain is specialized enough to distinguish between one-in-a-hundred-million chance similarity, because it never comes up in our lives.

Interpol seems to recognize they're taking a risk in publishing these photos, and they caution that law enforcement would have to positively identify any suspects (with additional photos and corroborating data at their disposal). Still, I see two risks where innocent look-alikes could get caught up in this. The first is that, regardless of the advice to wait for positive ID, people are naturally going to be suspicious of any look-alike, and may take action. Though fear of terrorism now tops the list, fear of child molesters in our midst will always be right up there in terms of emotion-stirring boogiemen. The second, even more dangerous risk, is that Interpol itself will try to apply their usual "one-in-a-million" criteria for reasonable doubt to a one-in-a-hundred-million situation. That, I'd argue, would repeat the fiasco the FBI created when they arrested a Portland lawyer for the Madrid bombing, based on a close partial-fingerprint match and (presumably) the fact that he was Muslim.

Persistence of Persistence of Vision 

You know why movies seem to be continuous motion even though they're really just static images being shown at 48 frames per second — persistence of vision, right? Well, there's a great article on the Grand Illusions site about how that explanation is 'simple to understand', 'elegant', even 'poetic'... and also fundamentally incorrect.

Apparently psychologists have known for almost as long as film has been around that the explanation was bunk, but somehow film historians find it too compelling an explanation to give it up. Somehow, the image that images persist... persists.

AT&T gets the message 

Remember the 300-page AT&T / iPhone bill video that made the rounds a couple weeks ago? Looks like AT&T got the message:

AT&T free msg: We are simplifying your paper bill, removing itemized detail. To view all detail go to att.com/mywireless. Still need full paper bill? Call 611.

Offline Wikipedia Reader 

I used to love my locally-cached copy of Wikipedia on my Treo 650 (after two years, a new update of the TomeRaider version was created back in February), but now that I've turned in my Treo for an iPhone I'm looking for a replacement reader. I'm not there yet, but this desktop-based offline Wikipedia reader is a good start to the project. As the author puts it:

Isn't the world of Open Source amazing? I was able to build this in two days, most of which were spent searching for the appropriate tools. Simply unbelievable... toying around with these tools and writing less than 200 lines of code, and... presto!

More on my efforts to get a locally-cached copy of Wikipedia readable from my iPhone (perhaps with the iPhone book-reader app that was recently hacked together) once it comes back from repairs...

(Thanks to Fairyshaman for the link!)

Why natural-language processing is hard 

You can see my house from here, part n 

Wonder if there's a general law to be learned about the median time between release of a public-image server and the first reports of someone doing something embarrassing being discovered in the database?

Photosynth demo at TED 2007 

Nice video of a Photosynth demo at this year's TED conference:

Shame their demo doesn't work on the Mac, but given that it's now coming out of Microsoft Labs that's not surprising :)

(Thanks to Aileen for the link!)

Anoto-based Audio Notebook 

Today's NYT has a blurb on Livescribe, the new company founded by LeapFrog's Jim Marggraff to turn the Anoto-based FLY Pentop Computer into a note-taking application for students. His application is basically Lisa Stifelman's 1997 Audio Notebook system but without all the extraneous hardware that was necessary back then: take notes on paper while the pen records the lecture. Tap on the note later and the pen recites whatever it recorded just before you wrote it.

As the article notes, pen-based input has had a long and difficult life, but I've always thought that if anything will be the killer app that brings it into the mainstream, this would be it. If their implementation is good, they've got a chance of really making a big splash.

Video of Sony's OLED flexible display 

In case you haven't seen it yet, here's video of the flexible, full-color OLED display that Sony unveiled at last week's SID conference.

They're not customers, they're a captive audience! 

My local Shell station has decided to augment its super-low prices of just $3.60 a gallon with some alternate revenue: automatic full-video and audio advertisements blasted at you while you pump gas.

At least there's some satisfaction in the movie trailer they were showing in the rotation — after being subjected to several annoying ads there's something satisfying about seeing explosions playing out on your gas pump.

Great visualization tools from GapMinder.org 

Here's a video of an incredible talk Hans Rosling gave at last year's TED conference. On one level it's a talk about trends in world health (Rosling is a professor of international health at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden), but at another level it's about the need for much better visualization tools so people can make sense out of all the data we already have freely available in public databases. The whole talk is an example, using tools developed by the non-profit Rosling founded called Gapminder.

After watching the video, check out Gapminder World, being hosted by Google.

(Thanks to my dad for the link!)

Wells Fargo pushing the envelope 

Wells Fargo is using optical scanning and OCR to improve how their customers deposit checks in ATMs. No more empty envelope drawers and out-of-ink pens; now you just put all your checks and cash in a stack and insert it into the slot. The ATM automatically scans each one in, does optical character recognition to tell how much each is for and puts up a verification screen. After you correct the amounts, the machine will either spit out a receipt with a summary line for each transaction or a printed image of each scanned check. From their press release:

"With the new technology, you don't need to spend time writing on an envelope or keying in a deposit amount. You just insert your money into a slot and the machine sorts, counts and verifies it," said Jonathan Velline, head of Wells Fargo's ATM Banking division. "Our Envelope-Free ATMs also converts paper checks into a digital image which then appears on the ATM screen and receipt, so you know your check was received. You can't get this in the traditional envelope world."

I used one of their machines in Alameda recently and it was pretty slick, though I had to insert each of my three checks individually since it couldn't handle my differently-sized and somewhat wallet-wrinkled stack.

Red Cross Earthquake Preparedness ad 

Photo credit: Jason de Fillippo

Nice earthquake preparedness ad campaign from the Bay Area Red Cross: they've got a billboard truck in San Francisco's Justin Herman plaza that when viewed from the right angle overlays right on top of the real architecture. More on the campaign here. (Via Jason de Fillippo, thanks to my cousin Aaron for the link.)

Flash crowds in high schools 

From an NPR interview with Principal Ed Kovochich, who has banned cell phones in his Milwaukee high school because they've been causing flash crowds at what would otherwise have been a simple one-on-one fight:

Quite a bit of the school was text messaged where the fight was taking place, and soon there were hundreds, and they were cheering and jeering and usually you get into that mob violence mentality. And suddenly what was 3-on-1 became 3-on-2 and then 3-on-3 and etc. and before you knew it we had a lot of kids fighting.

Advertising Chinese Menu 

The New York Times discusses the new trend towards building your own custom television commercials via the Web:

They can automatically add names of local sales agents or dealership addresses, and they can change the content of the ad, depending on where it is showing, to appeal to various demographic groups. Among the companies that have used these services are Wendy’s, Ford Motor, Coldwell Banker and Warner Independent Pictures... The automated system it is offering to advertisers, called Pick-n-Click, is currently available only for automotive advertisers and has 150,000 components —like voice-overs, video footage and text options.

Roll-out display roll out 

Polymervision has announced a partnership with Telecom Italia to roll out (pun intended, sorry) an e-book reader with a flexible display:

While smaller than a typical mobile phone, the new device features a display which extends up to 5-inches and may simply be stored away after use by folding it, thanks to the flexibility of the polymer based display material. The device features the largest display available in the industry for the same form factor, the 16 grey levels combined with a high contrast and high reflectivity display for paper like reading experience enables comfortable reading, even in bright sunlight. Future developments include colour and moving image capable display.

(Thanks to Dirk for the link.)

Zink unveils mobile full-color thermopaper printer 

The Polaroid spin-off Zink just unveiled a new full-color thermal-paper printer based on technology from Polaroid's Project Opal. From the SJ Mercury News:

Zink prints a 2-by-3-inch picture in 30 seconds -- somewhat slower than inkjet printers -- that comes out dry. It brings back the instant gratification of 1970s-era Polaroid picture, without forcing you to wait for it to develop. And it's a much better quality print than Polaroids were.

With Zink devices, the plastic paper has layers of plastic in the middle with millions of tiny crystal dyes that can be activated by heat. If you heat the paper a certain amount, the dyes melt and you get yellow. If you heat it less but for a slightly longer time, you get magenta. If you heat it a little less and slightly longer, you get cyan. Those colors can be mixed to print any color. If you think of microwaving a frozen dinner, you get the idea.

The special paper is still a little expensive (about 80 cents for a 4-by-6-inch print) because it has to be doped with ink over the entire surface, but the company hopes to reduce the cost in the future.

Choose your own adventure books translated to iPod 

The original Choose Your Own Adventure books are now available as audio ebooks for your iPod. If you'd like to try a free download, turn to page 22.If you'd like to continue walking until you reach the end, turn to page 42. (Thanks to Janie for the link.)

iTV vs. Tivo 

It'll be interesting to watch how Apple's iTV + iTunes competes with Tivo in the long run. The big difference is that iTV is inherently narrowcast — play podcasts and downloads from the iTunes store — while Tivo's main schtick is to provide the advantage of narrowcast on top of a legacy broadcast video distribution system (cable).

Long-term I always bet on narrowcast, but there's still a big question of timing: when does enough content become available on the Internet that you no longer need your cable TV subscription? And how much can Apple do to make that day come a little sooner?

Apple's gain is Palm's loss... 

Ouch. As of now AAPL is up just over 6%, PALM and RIMM both down around 5%.

So much more than an iPod Phone... 

I've been yawning about the rumors of a phone that's also an iPod — music is the least of the apps that I use on my phone, and I'm quite happy with my Treo 650. But a quad-mode phone that runs OS X, including dashboard widgets and Safari, with GSM, EDGE, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth? Now that's a big deal! (And just as the future of Palm OS was looking a little shaky — looks like now I can continue with my life-long dream of never having to use any form of Windows. :)

I'm especially looking forward to playing with is the two-fingered "pinch" interface for resizing, something that's possible because their touchscreen can handle multiple touches at once — I've wanted something like that since I saw Sun's Starfire concept video back in 1993...

Swivel 

Swivel looks like it might be interesting. They're billing their service as "YouTube for Data," where you can upload your data sets and then graph or compare them to other sets. In its best form I can imagine something like this supporting open source style research, especially if they support ways to explain and present your data (that or a good API for bloggers to link in data). In its worst form I could see any sensible analysis of the data sets getting burried under a pile of meaningless correlation statistics.

Description via TechCrunch (via Datamining Blog):

Swivel Co-founders Dmitry Dimov and Brian Mulloy start off by describing their company as “YouTube for Data.” That’s a good start for someone trying to understand it, because the site allows users to upload data - any data - and display it to other users visually. The number of page views your website generates. Or a stock price over time. Weather data. Commodity prices. The number of Bald Eagles in Washington state. Whatever. Uploaded data can be rated, commented and bookmared by other users, helping to sort the interesting (and accurate) wheat from the chaff. And graphs of data can be embedded into websites. So it is in fact a bit like a YouTube for Data.

But then the real fun begins. You and other users can then compare that data to other data sets to find possible correlation (or lack thereof). Compare gas prices to presidential approval ratings or UFO sightings to iPod sales. Track your page views against weather reports in Silicon Valley. See if something interesting occurs.

Tai-Chi turns your desk into a touch-pad 

The New Scientist has a write-up on an EU-funded prototype system called Tai-Chi that can turn ordinary surfaces into a touch-pad input device just by attaching a tiny piezoelectric sensor (i.e. microphone) to the surface. In one configuration, the system figures out where you're touching / tapping by listening to how vibrations are distorted by the object and then either comparing to a database of vibration "fingerprints." The method requires calibration to create the database, but they're claiming accuracy to within a few millimeters.

At least the spammers feel sorry for us... 

From some email spam mail I just got:

Hi thisisjusttestletter.
How are you ? Call me.
Poor you, i don't even think how much spam you are recive.
when they can

That makes two of us.

Buxton on alchemy vs. prospecting 

In his closing plenary at this year's CSCW, Bill Buxton made a provocative point about how to make a difference in the research world. His key point was that people often think of technology as alchemy, creating gold out of nothing. But alchemy (the creation of brand new ideas) is very hard and very rare, and is ultimately a fool's game. Most progress comes not from alchemy but from prospecting, the recognition of good ideas that are already out there, the understanding of which ideas are ripe for exploitation and the ability to marshal the right resources to get them into the world. He quotes Alan Kay: "It takes almost as much creativity to understand a good idea as to have it in the first place."

The example he gave was of the Blackboard, which was invented in 1801 and which Buxton claims revolutionized education more than every other technology introduced into schools since then put together. Before 1801 each child had his or her own slateboard, which he or she used to mark and correct answers before copying them down on paper. Buxton noted as an aside the irony that we're now trying to reintroduce slates into the classroom in the form of tablet PCs, but his main point was the fact that there're very few differences between a slate and a blackboard: a blackboard is just a slate that's been made an order of magnitude larger and hung on the wall. A technologist looking for novel innovation might overlook such a "minor" modification, and yet that slight change made all the difference.

Bill Buxton prediction on cheap ubiquitous displays 

Bill Buxton gave the closing plenary talk at this year's Computer Supported Collaborative Work conference this year, and bet everyone a drink that in seven years:

...it will be as cheap to buy, per square foot, to buy 100 dpi full-color displays as the same square-footage of whiteboard today. In 7 years, displays with on the order of 20 times more pixels than are on that screen right now [pointing to a 15' x 15' projector screen] but the same size will be cheaper than that screen is right now without the projector. It's going to be about one to ten dollars a square foot for a 100 dpi full-color display that's 6mm thick. And the only question is which of the six or so competing technologies is gonna get there first.

And now, what does that mean? That's a technological affordance, it doesn't mean anything except that it's interesting because I'm a technologist. But as a designer, as a citizen, as a father, I care because now I can't think about watches, mobile phones, or any of these other devices out of the context of these portable wearable types of things moving around in space collectively and relating to those things there on the wall. What's that mean for education, what's it mean for business, how do we conduct our meetings? And that is CSCW, or a different branch of it. And the amount of effort put to that, to me, is still really low.

Personally I think he's being a little optimistic the time scale, but not by a lot, and he's certainly right that researchers need to be thinking about how that changes the environments in which we work and live. And he has a little built-in slack in his prediction: CSCW only meets every other year, so even if he's wrong we won't be able to collect on our drink until 2014.

Spam, spam, spam, beaked beans, spam, spam... 

According to this graph of spam volume by spam blacklister TQMcube, spam volume has increased more than tenfold in the past six months. I'm not sure if this is some kind of attempt to overwhelm spam-filters and blacklisting services or just another ratcheting up, but I do find it disheartening that doing a news search for "major increase in spam" results in posts and news reports that span several years. (Thanks to Jeff for the link to the graph.)

Reuters opens Second Life bureau 

A few days ago Reuters opened a bureau in Second Life, the online virtual world that's more second home than game to some 400,000 (presumably part-time) residents. Adam Pasick is bureau chief and sole reporter, and is dedicated fulltime to Second Life. As science fiction writer Charlie Strauss put it a month ago, "Truth stranger than fiction? Must write faster, the clowns are gaining ..." (Via NPR's Marketplace.)

Fox uses Treo to break plane crash news 

A Fox News cameraman was about 20 blocks away when the New York small-plane crash occurred last week, so he broadcast live via his Palm Treo smart-phone. (Thanks to Jamey for the link.)

Custom scream tones 

You've probably already heard about the cell phone that screams after it's reported as stolen. My friend GirlPurple has suggested the perfect add-on market: Custom Scream Tones.

BlackNet and fungible bits 

From a NYT article on the efforts of credit card companies to cut out child-pornography sites from their networks:

Among purveyors of child pornography, Mr. Christenson said, there is a “growing trend toward steering visitors of these sites to various alternative payment methods.”

Mr. Christie said one of those methods involved granting access to Web sites in return for explicit photographs of children. “That phenomenon is something that we are very concerned about,” Mr. Christie said.

Tim May's original BlackNet concept warned that modern crypto can make illegal trafficking in pure information nearly impossible to trace. The main obstacle to making BlackNet-like networks a reality at a consumer level has been handling payment: anonymous e-cash systems never really got traction, and non-anonynmous financial services leave a trail right to a criminal's door.

What remains is a system of barter, or "CryptoCredits" as the BlackNet post describes them. Back when it was written digital information wasn't all that fungible: there were a limited number of things that one could exchange in pure-digital form, and the BlackNet post mostly described a market for high-stakes digital goods like trade secrets and business intelligence. But bits have become much more fungible in the past thirteen years, and nowadays an illegal info-trader can find pure-digital goods at all levels of illegality. He might trade kiddie porn for digital movies, blackmail info for stolen credit card numbers, control over zombied PCs for World of Warcraft gold, or passwords to porn sites for validated spam addresses. He might even contract for specific services, ranging from mundane transcription of documents to decoding of CAPTCHAs to obtaining the phone records of an HP board member.

Amazon e-book reader 

Engadget has the dish on the new "Amazon Kindle" eBook reader being developed by Amazon, complete with wireless for instant eBook purchases and what looks like an eInk display. (Let's hear it for people who regularly troll for new FCC Filings reports!)

Subliminals in my spam 

This may be old hat to some of you, but it was new to me — I just got an email spam that includes subliminals. The whole ad is an animated GIF designed such that the word BUY! flashes over the email for a split second every 30 seconds (including briefly as the email loads). I doubt this'll actually make the spam any more effective (and in this case it's a stock-push-scam, so the spammer-scammer won't know either), but it's interesting to see what they're up to these days.

Google acquires image-classification company 

From a blog post by Google's Picasa Product Manager:

Neven Vision comes to Google with deep technology and expertise around automatically extracting information from a photo. It could be as simple as detecting whether or not a photo contains a person, or, one day, as complex as recognizing people, places, and objects. This technology just may make it a lot easier for you to organize and find the photos you care about. We don't have any specific features to show off today, but we're looking forward to having more to share with you soon.

Neven Vision's page now redirects to the Google blog post, but a cached copy in The Wayback Machine indicates they've been focusing on face recognition technology of late, and C|NET mentions their iScout software for mobile phones that uses images shot with a camera phone to access additional content. (Link via John Battelle's Searchblog, with some nice extra info at SearchEngineWatch.)

NPUC 2006: Power to the users: the new web 

Each year IBM Almaden hosts the New Paradigms in Using Computers workshop. This year's theme was Web 2.0, which in this case roughly meant the mix of community sites, blogs and wikis that make up the supposed "next wave" of the Net.

Below the cut are my notes on this year's meeting. They're still in rough form (and of course are just based on my own recollection and what I managed to type as I was listening), but please enjoy!

Technorati tag: npuc2005

Automation and Customization of the Rendered Web Pages
Rob Miller (User Interface Design Group, MIT CSAIL)

Dr. Miller talked about ChickenFoot, a Firefox extension that makes it (somewhat) easier for non-programmers to customize web pages they come to. The idea is to let people create a bookmark for things like "my latest bank statement," or add a link on every Amazon book review page to the MIT library website's listing for the given book.

Essentially it inserts extra Javascript into the webpage, and you can use the framework to write raw Javascript extensions, but their main contribution is in a few functions that let you specify things like click 'I feel lucky' button instead of having to see what that button is called internally by the page's raw HTML code. They're now working on a version that does full keyword spotting and highlights the buttons as you specify them.

There's clearly a tension between web-page authors and users here, and authors might not want users modifying their webpages because it hurts their business model (like the Amazon example above), or because a customization is pounding their server (as a GreaseMonkey script did to GMail last year), or because bugs in customization get blamed on provider. To this Miller says we've been down this road before with ad blockers, frame around content and deep linking, and that content providers are fighting a losing battle here: those that fight their users will lose their users.

New Paradigms in Social Computing
Ross Mayfield (Socialtext)

My favorite talk of the bunch. Ross is the founder of Socialtext, which provides enterprises with a wiki and offers hosting services. One piece ofnews is that they just announced Socialtext Open, an open-source (MPL 1.1) version of their main software that's identical to their non-big-enterprise version.

Here are a few key concepts and quotes; check out his slides for more details.

• It's not about the tools, it's about the practices people develop for using the tools.

• "Web 2.0 is made of people." (yes, like Soylent Green.) All that matters is participation: how do you incent people to contribute?

• One of his case studies (DrKW Wiki, an intranet for the investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort) had three inflection points of adoption that corresponded to additional features: single-sign-on to the wiki (from the same sign-on as the rest of the intranet, I presume), WYSIWYG editing of pages so non-techies could participate, and mobile access. Traffic to the wiki was greater than the rest of the intranet in just 6 months. CIO of DrKW: "For early adapters, email-volume on related projects is down 75%; meeting times have been whacked in half."

• "PDFs is where knowledge goes to die."

• Open Source (and Wikipedia in particular) is kept strong by the constant threat of the "Right To Fork." At any time, anyone can copy the Wikipedia software and content and fork, and they've had to stay relevant to fight that off.

• He's now working with Dan Brickland on wikiCalc. Some questions he's asking: What happens when a document is a cell and a cell is a document? And anyone can change a cell? And each one has an RSS feed? And they compute / interact with nearby cells in some way? Distributed?

• Suggested reading: Why Do People Write for Wikipedia? Incentives to Contribute to Open-Content Publishing, by Andrea Forte and Amy Bruckman from Georgia Tech.

New Paradigms at Flickr
Stewart Butterfield (founder of Flickr)

Key points:

Photography used to be about memory preservation, now it's about communication & connection.

Trends:

• Ubiquity of capture devices (and always with you, and no cost to capture)
• Spread of the network (home, work, mobile)
• Change in perceptions and attitudes — participating is no longer weird (e.g. online dating is no longer creepy).

People aren't generating "content." What they're doing (and motivated by) is:

• The creation and maintenance of relationships w/ other people
• sharing, giving & contributing
• pursuit of recognition & acknowledgment
• pushing of their point of view / politics / ideas

Strategies

• Make things "massively multiplayer"
• create an ecosystem, not just a distribution channel
• content/media objects become the locus for interaction, rather than things which are passively "consumed"

Interesting statistic: about half their traffic is on their API rather than their webpage (about 10-12M API calls / day).

Teenagers on the Go
Sam Ruby (IBM, Atom, Apache Foundation, Intertwingly.net)

His main predictions (based mostly on watching his two teenagers and generally being a bright guy):

• Web and voice will be overshadowed by cellphones, and in particular texting (and maybe asynchronous voice-messaging).

• Adults see the Web as important. Teens create ugly web pages. Teens see the Web as transient — like IM. Email is only for talking to parents and teachers, and the Web is rapidly heading this way. POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) will probably go that way too: a legacy technology for communicating with geezers who haven't made the jump.

• Limits on who will publish? Depends on your definition of "publish," but probably only a few extroverts will publish globally. Most will publish things only readable by friends.

• Future: ubiquitous access to the net. Free or flat fee (today: Skype to Skype is free). RSS, small chunks of text (blogging), more audio, video, IM integrated with community-ware (e.g. LJ-Jabber). All via cellphone. Desktops will be docking stations and used for offline editing.

• Zero-cost publishing means the cost of failure is zero. Ready-aim-fire becomes Ready, Fire-Aim-fire-aim-fire-aim...

• Who loses: Those that control the "last mile" (cable, phone land-lines).

• Who wins: People with opinions (extroverts). People who are always online. Those that can deploy quickly, and update quickly. Perpetual beta. Those that collapse development and operations. Asynchronous, Open Source, VOIP. The half-life of concept to End-Of-Life is approaching 5 years.

(Avoiding) The Travesty of the Commons?
Tom Gruber (RealTravel, tomgruber.org)

The trouble with community-generated information: blog spam, "IP looting," and marketplace for fake reviews. Many (most?) hotel managers have someone working non-stop to plant false reviews for his hotel on the various online review sites.

RealTravel is a web service that lets people post their travel logs, tips and reviews online. The idea is to offer more trustworthy information (and fuller information) because it's tied to a full profile including pictures, maps of where someone went, travel logs, etc.

The hard part is motivating participation: why should I share my feedback & advice with strangers? Answer: Do it for your friends & family. With style (i.e. with tools to make the write-up look really professional). Add auto-generated maps, recommendations for hotels & restaurants, embedded photos, etc.

Principle of design: motivate through enlightened self-interest. Design services that reward individual behavior that has global benefit. Communicate the value proposition to people who would recognize that value.

Key Motivators (design these, and target audiences with these motivators):

• entertainment value of participation
• social connection
• ego / ambition
• altruism

Why should users do things that benefit the community? is the wrong question. Make doing the right thing low-friction. "Snap to grid," e.g. have auto-complete of all the cities in the world, snap "diving" to the main-taxonomy tag "diving & snorkeling."

Socialtext wiki software goes open source 

At IBM's NPUC workshop yesterday, Ross Mayfield announced that his company has released an Open Source distribution of Socialtext, their flagship wiki software, under a Mozilla Public License (MPL 1.1). I wasn't all that pleased with any wikis I've tried in the past (including SocialText when I played with it over a year ago)... might be time for me to give it another try and see how it looks.

Socialtext Open can be downloaded from Sourceforge.

Personal Aura Device 

My friends Bill & Amy have set up a page for their Personal Aura Device, a set of sound-reactive LED poi and clothing they're designing and building for Burning Man this year. Seeing them in action is amazing — they have one controller with a microphone that wirelessly controls boards fitted with with extremely bright red, green and blue LEDs. The main music mode ties intensity of each color to a different frequency band in the audio, so base and drums beat in the blues, mid-tones in the greens and vocalists and guitar are followed by the red. It's pretty hypnotic to watch, especially when they've got two sets of poi plus costuming all pulsing in unison to the music.

LiveJournal-integrated Jabber 

Interesting: Livejournal has just launched a Jabber server, and are developing integrated features like posting via Jabber and of course integrated Friends and Buddy lists. And they'll be federating, so you'll be able to talk to other Jabber-enabled systems (like GMail/GTalk) without the usual mucking about in monopoly-space (you know, like you do with AIM, MSN, Yahoo! Messenger, and all the other dark-age services that still wish it was 1990).

(Thanks to Sunyata__ for the link!)

Open source Javascript debugger for OS X 

From OpenDarwin (thanks to Dave for the link):

I would like to introduce a new addition to the WebKit open source tools—a JavaScript debugger. Drosera, named after the largest genera of bug eating plants, lets you attach and debug JavaScript for any WebKit application—not just Safari.

One of the unique things about Drosera, like the Web Inspector, is that over 90% of it is written in HTML and JavaScript. This is a true testament of what you can do with web technologies today and the rapid development that WebKit allows.

BumpTop 3D Desktop 

There's a nice video demo up of the BumpTop 3D Desktop from the University of Toronto's Dynamic Graphics Lab. Here's the abstract from their paper (presented at CHI this year):

We explore making virtual desktops behave in a more physically realistic manner by adding physics simulation and using piling instead of filing as the fundamental organizational structure. Objects can be casually dragged and tossed around, influenced by physical characteristics such as friction and mass, much like we would manipulate lightweight objects in the real world. We present a prototype, called BumpTop, that coherently integrates a variety of interaction and visualization techniques optimized for pen input we have developed to support this new style of desktop organization.

I don't know about this being a full desktop replacement, but for some kinds of applications I could see it working quite well. For example, I'd love it for sorting through tens to hundreds of images or other visual media, especially if they added two-handed or multi-handed interaction to it.

Bush Speech Generator 

Check out the Bush Speech Generator: now you get to be the guy controlling the radio teleprompter hidden under Bush's coat! (By way of GeneratorBlog, by way of Dorothy.)

On demos and Heisenbugs 

If I were to write a kind of How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying kind of guide to giving demos of your research, it would probably include the following list of things to avoid:

1. Infrastructure: the only time people notice the plumbing is when it doesn't work, and the challenges involved are subtle and non-obvious. Stick with pretty interfaces that demo themselves.
2. Multiple caches: Cached information can mask what's really going on in a system and change the results from one demo to the next. This is even worse when some of those caches involve software that isn't yours.
3. Multiple threads: Multi-threaded applications are a bear to debug, and are a great way to introduce race conditions and deadlocks that invariably only pop up when you're giving a demo to someone important.
4. Anything involving networking: Networks are complex and cantankerous creatures that can fail for a number of reasons beyond your control.
5. Wireless: That goes double for wireless. Especially since wireless acts differently when you're in a room full of audience members who all have their own laptops out and broadcasting.
6. Asynchronous communications: Throw in multiple machines (read: multiple potential failure points) where the same exact user action might produce different effects depending on the timing of how messages are sent and you've got a situation where you can successfully test the same demo 10 times in a row and still not know for sure if it'll work on the 11th try.

Never one to take the easy route, my current research project contains every one of these features. No matter how many successful trials I run, I never really know whether this time it'll go boom.

Drag & Drop sortable lists in Javascript 

Here's a nice example and how-to on drag & drop sortable lists in Javascript (by way of Steve)

How to stress-test academic-reference trackers 

Apparently there's another Bradley J. Rhodes out there that publishes in a vaguely related field (Cognitive and Neural Systems) and who got his Ph.D. from Boston University at the same time I got mine from MIT. This should cause no end of fun-filled confusion for years to come!