DocBug

Adding irony to injury for Kodachrome 

Reporting on Kodak's retiring of their famed Kodachrome film, NPR's All Things Considered, Melissa Block interviewed photographer Steve McCurry (emphasis mine):

I'm looking at one of your most iconic images, this is the photo of a young Afghan girl... she's wearing a brick-red head scarf and there's a green background and her eyes are just popping off the screen...

I think that just about says it all. You can also view an online gallery of what some of the great photos taken with Kodachrome look like after they've been scanned, digitized, and re-rendered on whatever computer monitor you happen to have. Such vivid colors!

PVI buys E Ink for ~$215 Million 

Taiwanese display company Prime View International announced today it will be purchasing E Ink for about $215. PVI has been a long-time partner of E Ink, and supplies the backplane for the Amazon Kindle and Sony's eReader, which use E Ink's ink technology.

Latest Plastic Logic E Ink-based reader 

TechCrunch has a nice video showing off Plastic Logic's new prototype e-reader based on E Ink. Plastic Logic's main advantage is their plastic backplane (rather than glass) which is lighter and less fragile. They're also pitching their interface to focus more on business use — in particular the ability to annotate documents (using a touchscreen) and a sidebar that allows them jump to different pages more quickly.

This is just a prototype and so probably an unfair criticism, but I do note that when the demonstrator selects a different document and says "we are able to quickly move from any of the last five documents you've been reading" there is an 8.5 second delay before the new document comes up.

Amazon asking for 70% of newspaper subscription revenue? 

From an interview with Jim Moroney, publisher of The Dallas Morning News, with Brooke Gladstone at On the Media:

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Now, you testified about your negotiations with Amazon regarding the Kindle electronic reader. Could you tell us about that?

JIM MORONEY: Somebody was bringing up the Kindle as the solution we should all be focused on. And I love the Kindle. I read books on it all the time. My problem is that after negotiating and negotiating and negotiating, the very best deal we could get from Amazon was to split revenues for whatever price we decided to charge. We could get 30 percent of that money. They get 70 percent.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Wow.

JIM MORONEY: I could have probably lived with that, but there was another clause in there that they would not give me relief on, and that said that they have the right to relicense my content to any portable device, not just an Amazon-owned device, any portable device. In essence, I was giving them a complete licensing agreement for nothing for all of my content, period.

I'm sort of – that’s - give away my future, you know.

If Amazon came back – I thought maybe they'd call today – and said, do you know what, we'll give up on that little clause about the relicensing of your IP, I would have said, okay, you know what - I'll try this thing at 70/30 and see if it works. But nobody called today, as far as I can tell.

Compare that to Apple, who keeps about 35% to 40% of the price of the 99-cent purchase price for a song sold on iTunes. Of course, Apple's main business model is selling iPods while Amazon's main business model is selling content, but even so I'm surprised Amazon is demanding such a high percentage for what still amounts to an untested market. Maybe they figure (probably correctly) that newspapers are desperate enough to go for it?

Video killed the MP3 download? 

I missed Obama's press conference on Wednesday and wanted to listen to it on my long commute home yesterday. To my surprise, it was easy to find full video and typically a full-text transcript of the conference from sites like The Huffington Post and NPR.org as well as YouTube and directly from the White House Blog, but no audio-only sources. Eventually I had to use Farkie, a free online video-converter to download the Youtube video and convert it to MP3.

Am I missing some obvious source source, or has video made such headway now that nobody even bothers making audio-only versions available anymore?

Paperless office gets political 

Apparently, the White House Press Corp shares my interest in technological shifts from paper to digital. I'm a research scientist at a company that makes photocopiers — I wonder what their excuse is?

Microsoft Office Labs vision 2019 

Microsoft Office Labs has come out with a very nice "vision of the future video" called "2019" — Long Zheng over at iStartedSomething has posted both a short montage and longer 5 minute version (I recommend the longer).

I've always loved these sort of concept videos from corporate reserach labs, and as the medium goes I'd rate this one pretty high. The production value is top-knotch (as are most other such videos from Microsoft). As you'd expect, there are many kernels of ideas that have been around — I was especially reminded of Hiroshi Ishi's ClearBoard, Jun Rekimoto's Pick-and-Drop and various aspects from Bruce Tognazzini's Starfire concept video — but there were still many concepts that were new to me. And unlike so many concept videos out there they seem to have mostly avoided the trap of assuming that devices will have a combination of strong AI and psychic powers.

Printing The NYT Costs Twice As Much As Sending Every Subscriber A Free Kindle 

Nicholas Carlson at The Silicon Alley Insider does the math.

Using 3D printers to create individual frames for Coraline 

Very cool article and movie about how the makers of Coraline used 3D printers to create individual facial expressions and other effects. So would that make Coraline a CG stop-motion animation?

Do your blog posts reveal your personality type? 

Typealyzer claims to be able to determine the Myers-Briggs personality type of someone just by analyzing their blog. It's still in beta, which may be why they list me as an ISTJ ("The Duty Fulfillers") -- the exact opposite of how every other Myers-Briggs personality test classifies me.

New media criticism blog: Medialogy.net 

Medialogy.net is a new media criticism blog started by Geoffrey Alan Rhodes (my brother), Blinxia Yu and Christopher Ernst:

:|: Medialogy.net is a new net criticism initiative publishing micro-essay insights into current trends in media and visual culture. It is an open forum for new critical voices; we are continuously seeking articles and comments with fresh perspectives on emerging media phenomena. Medialogy.net was begun with the desire to distribute, expand, and textually manifest a rolling conversation between young media researchers and artists globally networked through the university and gallery system. We seek to match a cynical perspective with critical intelligence, and a constant willingness to pull down old paradigms and icons of media philosophy and cultural criticism.

It's especially interesting to see discussion about the same media trends and subjects I tend to link to (OK, when I'm posting at all), but from the perspective of people who come first from the media side (in this case film) and second from the technology side rather than the other way around.

iCandy 

My lab has just released a beta of iCandy, an application for Mac and PC that lets you associate an image and a two-dimensional QR bar code with any iTunes song, YouTube video or Flickr photo, and to print them out as postcards, business cards, posters or photo albums. Then you can just hold the barcode up to a webcam to automatically bring up the photo or play the song or movie.

The app itself is pretty cute (we've been using it internally for a few months now) and they've recently set up a community network site for sharing your playlists and media pics with others too. The online Flash-based version seems to be broken at the moment, but check out the app.

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!

Fun with lasers 

At the Ambidexterous Magazine launch party last night, Chris Tacklind (of D2M, I think) was showing off his laser-diode glove. These things are lots of fun — I remember my group-mate Michael P. Johnson built one when I was at the Media Lab, and got good enough he could make little figure-8s with two fingers while the other dots circled around them.

Something I hadn't seen before and liked even better was a sound-display toy Chris was playing with, but I forgot to take a picture that one (eit!). It was just a small cardboard tube with a balloon stretched across one end, and a laser diode shining onto a small mirror stuck to the end of the balloon. You'd speak or sing into the tube and the sound vibrations would show up as little laser shows on the wall in front of you. Use it as a drum and you'd get even cooler effects. (Chris goes around teaching kids to make these things — the one he had was made by a 10-year old.)

Now I want to install something like that into the bottom of the little dumbek drum I have. Stretch a membrane across the bottom of the drum and attach a laser pointer to the inside of the drum shining onto a mirror on the membrane such that it reflects up onto the underside of the white translucent drumhead. Aligned correctly, I bet I could get some fun lasershow-style patterns on the drum head on every beat. (Might need to modify the design if the membrane changes the sound too much — we'll see.)

Webaroo 

Remember my continuing rant about how it's time to just cache the entire Web and keep it local? A start-up named Webaroo has a similar idea. They're offering free software (Windows only) that caches "webpacks" of pages that make up certain interest areas, and update those caches whenever you re-synch. Their current plan is the usual "pay for it all through advertising" model.

I've not tried it yet and don't know how easy it is to personalize webpacks or how well they handle things like accessing pages that require sign-in, but it definitely looks like a good start. (And if they do the job well, I could easily see them winding up being purchased by one of the big players in search.)

(Thanks to Aileen for the link!)

Google Related Links 

It took them longer than I expected, but it looks like Google has finally come out with a Related Links feature that people can add automatically-updated links to related searches, news or web pages on to their sites. Think Google Adwords only with search results instead of pay-for-placement advertisements. The text-box is simple to add to any webpage (it took me all of 30 seconds) and gets updated to whatever info is current when the page is viewed — essentially adding dynamic related content even if your page remains static.

I'm pleased to see this concept finally becoming mainstream, especially since the Margin Notes system I developed back in 1999 was a pioneer in the area. One issue that was tricky to figure out is what scope to use as the automatic search term. You can see the problem if you're viewing this post in an aggregator like LiveJournal or even on my own main page — the search results are probably related at least in part to other posts on the page and not just this one. It's a hard problem in the general case, but they should be able to get it to work most of the time. (I've not yet looked at their code to see what they're actually doing — more after I check it out.) [Update 12:45pm: actually, LiveJournal strips out all Javascript so it won't show up anyway... click here to see the actual post if you're in LJ and have no clue what I'm talking about.]

One thing I didn't have to worry about with Margin Notes was how to keep the system from being gamed by spammers and Google-juice stealers, though I did have to worry about relevance to individual readers. Something I'd like to see is a similar system that uses my own RSS subscriptions as the core source of info, plus perhaps one level of linkage out (e.g. take my blog-roll & RSS subscriptions plus the blog-roll and RSS subscriptions associated with each of those sites). That would give me some amount of personalization as well as make it harder to game the system.

(via Google Blogoscoped)

Update 12:30pm: I took a quick peek at the JavaScript, and as you probably could guess all it does is send a specially formatted request to http://www.googlesyndication.com/relcontent/content?... that includes the page's URL. Sure enough, one second after I loaded the page in my browser I saw another retrieval from Google. Makes sense — you don't want to have to deal with parsing the source document in the JavaScript itself — though it does mean the feature probably won't work at all on pages that are behind a firewall. (That's probably all for the best, as otherwise it'd be all too easy to slip up and start broadcasting supposedly-secure information out to Google.)

That said, I'm surprised at how lousy the results are. It looks like they're relying on their cached copy when available, which for a blog post is, of course, almost guaranteed to not be related to the current post. As for the post-specific page, I'm getting lots of related links about blogs in general, which makes me suspect they're doing a bad job of distinguishing actual page content from my page's window dressing, Javascript and navigation bars. That really surprises me (if in fact it's where the trouble lies) since that's a problem they clearly know how to solve for their normal indexing.

Cure for information overload? 

Dang, I'm late to the party as usual. In case you haven't seen it yet, as cures for information overload go this looks like it has potential...

(Thanks to Jim for the link.)

Flash Surfing 

Long before flash mobs became the phonebooth-stuffing of the naughts, science fiction author Larry Niven speculated how the invention of teleportation would cause sudden flash crowds of gawkers to appear wherever a newsworthy event is taking place. Over at Searchblog, John Battelle suggests we're bound to see something similar happen in couch-potato-land once channel surfers can automatically see what show or media event everyone else is watching...

Multi-touchscreen application demo 

Image credit: Jeff Han

Jeff Han at NYU has a very nice demo video of what you can do with a multitouch-sensitive screen (video is also cached at youtube). This is using Frustrated total Internal Reflection to sense both pressure and location of multiple simultaneous touches.

(Thanks to /amq for the link!)

Keeping the djinni out of the bottle 

In many ways I see the problems with Google's centralization as just another facet of a tension that has existed since the Internet started: the tension between the decentralized "every end-user is his own service provider" model and the centralized fiefdom model where you sign up for one of a handful of service providers. I think it was the coming of the Web in the early '90s that finally tipped the scale in favor of the decentralized model, and as a result we saw an explosion of URLs and email addresses that weren't only from AOL, CompuServe or Prodigy. This, I think, was all for the better. But now the proliferation of GMail addresses and Google Base scare me precisely because they smack a little too much of the fiefdom model we so wisely avoided 15 years ago.

Fon 

From CNN Money:

NEW YORK (FORTUNE) - Aiming to increase access to the Internet, particularly for people away from home, Google, Skype and other leading Internet investors Sunday announced a $21.5 million investment in an innovative new Internet access network called Fon.

The company, founded by Spanish entrepreneur Martin Varsavsky, aims to build a network of WiFi hotspots far larger than those from companies like T-Mobile and Swisscom, none of which have more than 30,000 hotspots worldwide.

Fon aims to exceed that in its first year, and to have one million hotspots in four years. It hopes to achieve this by getting individuals and businesses to contribute their own hotspots to the network in exchange for getting access wherever they go. Those who contribute access get to use the access of others.

If Fon comes through with a simple-to-install and manage setup I can see this idea really gaining traction — it sounds like he's got the right level of incentive to end-users who donate their bandwidth, and the technology for charging non-members for hotspots is already tried & tested. (Heck, if it works well I'd pay $25 just to get his "use only 50% of your bandwidth on outsiders" software; I keep thinking something like that must exist, but I've yet to find one.)

Long as he can jump-start the process and can convince ISPs to let him in on a racket they'd love to control themselves I'd say he's got a good chance. (I see he's already signed on Speakeasy in the US, though they also have one of the most liberal wireless sharing policies around so others may be a harder sell.)

Nice freeware fonts... 

Quick plug: Misprinted Type has several nice freeware fonts (plus a few commercial ones) available for download for Mac and PC.

Optimus mini-three keyboard 

I'm not sure yet what I'd do with it, but the Optimus mini-three keyboard looks very fun: it's an auxiliary keyboard with three keys, each with its own little OLED screen displaying the current function (potentially animated). The most compelling examples are where not only is the button's function displayed but also what effect it'll have in the current context, like what image, song, or PowerPoint slide is coming up next when browsing through media.

USB 1.0, currently Windows only for the configuration software but others are coming. Pre-orderable for $100 until April 2nd, shipped to arrive on May 15th. This is coming out of the Art. Lebedev Studio in Russia — looks like they've also got a complete keyboard coming soon too.

(Thanks to Nerfduck for this link too!)

On the Internet, no one knows you're a pigeon... 

Via Reuters: UC Irvine professor Beatriz da Costa will be releasing 20 pigeons into the San Jose skies during this year's International Symmposium on Electronic Art. Each pigeon will be equipped with a camera, GPS, air-polution monitor and cellphone, and images and location-based polution data will be automatically posted to a PigeonBlog. (No word on whether PigeonBlog will comply with RFC 1149.)

Thanks to Nerfduck for the link!

Google VOIP? 

Almost exactly a year ago I made fun of the UK newspaper The Times for suggesting Google was gearing up enter the Voice Over IP space. Now it's starting to look like they were right...

Congressional staffers try to whitewash Wikipedia 

The Wikipedia community is trying to respond to whitewashing of politically-sensitive articles that appear to be coming from congressional staffers themselves (with the staff of Marty Meehan (D, MA) being one of the biggest culprits).

I'm always amazed that Wikipedia works as well as it does — hopefully the bad press Meehan and other congress-critters get over this flap will outweigh any good press specific staffers may have hoped to achieve.

Detailed coverage at Lowell Sun, C|net and Slashdot.

Google Talk joins the federation 

I'm a bit late on this, but I'm psyched to see that last week Google flipped the switch to allow all their Google Talk instant messenger accounts to talk to any other Jabber client out there. I've not verified it yet, but I think that included people with .Mac accounts using iChat, and BigBlueBall has a nice tutorial on how to use the federation to hook up your GTalk account directly to AIM, Yahoo!, MSN and ICQ using Jabber transport services.

This is the final step I've been waiting for before ditching my AIM account and going entirely to Jabber!

TiddlyDesktop 

TiddlyWiki, the personal Wiki where you store all your content in a single local Javascript-enabled webpage, now offers a new look: a desktop, complete with movable tiled windows. I'm not sure if this is a good idea or not (I can't imagine using this look myself), but at the very least it's an intriguing demonstration of what you can do with just Javascript and Cascading Style Sheets. (Thanks to John for the link.)

Podzinger 

Podzinger is a nice little search engine for podcasts that indexes the podcast audio (using BBN's speech-to-text software) as well as available metadata. They also have a nice interface for showing searched-for words in their transcript, with the words linking to the proper segment in the audio clip.

(Via John Battelle's Searchblog)

Annotated blog corpus to be released at WWE 2006 

Intelliseek will be a big corpus of spidered and annotated blog posts to attendees at the 3rd Annual Workshop on the Weblogging Ecosystem (held in conjunction with the WWW 2006 Conference in Edinburgh, Scottland):

The data release comprises a complete set of weblog posts for three weeks in July 2005 (on the order of 10M posts from 1M weblogs). This data set has been selected as it spans a period of time during which an event of global significance occurred, namely the London bombings.

The data set includes the full content of the posts plus mark-up. The marked-up fields include: date of posting, time of posting, author name, title of the post, weblog url, permalink, tags/categories, and outlinks classified by type - details may be found here.

Sounds like a great resource for researchers. I'm also amused (in a dark sort of way) by the datashare individual agreement they require people to sign — essentially they admit that there's no way they can get copyright clearance from all million or so bloggers they've collected, so they just ask everyone to agree to remove any posts if anyone complains, not use the results for commercial purposes and not use it passed the workshop.

GMail "Web Clips" are still context blind... 

GMail has added Web Clips at the top of their page, showing RSS and Atom feeds plus "relevant sponsored links" to the top of your messages. Unfortunately, it looks like only the sponsored links are actually relevant (which I read to mean "related to the message you're reading"). Clips from your own RSS feeds are still just random.

Hopefully they're busy working on fixing that — I still think automatic annotation of email (and blog entries) with other related entries form a largish set of favorite RSS feeds is a seriously useful application that needs to be exploited. Honestly, I've been expecting it to be just around the corner for about three years now, and I'm not sure why I'm still waiting. (I know, I know... if I really want it done I'd sit down and write one myself...)

Let's hear it for flexibility... 

Two interesting technologies have just been announced in the flexible-computing arena. First (via engadget) is NEC's announcement of their Organic Radical Battery, a 300-micron thick flexible battery with an energy density of about 1 mWh/cm² and recharge time of just 30 seconds. Then throw in Plastic Logic's announcement of a 10" diagonal SVGA E-Ink display (4-level greyscale) that's both flexible and less than 0.4mm thick. (Thanks to Kurt for the links!)

NEC's ORB battery	Plastic Logic's E-Ink based display

Google Maps plug-in for Mac Address Book 

Brian Toth's Google Maps plugin is a cute integration for OSX that lets you lookup your Apple Address Book addresses using Google Maps and also get directions between your Address Book addresses. (Thanks to Noel for the link!)

Very fly 

I picked up a Fly Pentop the other to play with (one of the advantages of being a user interface researcher is all the toys :). Here're a few thoughts.

There're at least four challenges with using a real ink pen as a computer interface:

1. There's no way to constrain where the user draws: strokes that should be invalid in your application leave marks just the same as valid strokes.
2. There's no way to tap or "drag" without leaving a mark, and no way to erase marks after you've left them.
3. There's no display to give feedback to your actions or computation. (The Fly uses audio for feedback, which gets around this limitation to some extent.)
4. You need a pre-printed sheet of paper for every pre-designed interface — the Fly comes with about 15 pre-printed games sheets, everything from word-search pages to maps you can tap on to test your geography knowledge. That doesn't scale well when dealing with applications with many different pages or when maintaining large numbers of applications, especially given that pages get "used up" when you write on them. On the other hand, the fact that paper is consumable makes for market opportunities that normal software doesn't have... I expect Leapfrog isn't too upset about that fact.
5. If you don't use a pre-designed interface (that is, you start with a blank sheet of paper) then the user is forced to draw the entire interface. The Fly has one game where you draw a piano keyboard that you can then play by tapping on the keys, but first it gives you explicit instructions like "draw 9 short vertical lines, going from left to right" to make sure you draw a keyboard it can understand.

In spite of these limitations, it's extremely engaging to be able to draw your own functional user interface — as anyone who read Harold and the Purple Crayon or watched Simon in the Land of Chalk Drawings as a kid knows. The effect really hit me when I was making a calculator. First I wrote the letter "C" and circled it to enter calculator mode. Then, as the pen spoke instructions to me, I drew a big rectangle and started to fill it with numbers and arithmetic symbols. I realized about three numbers in that I didn't have to stick to the usual layout and placed the rest of the numbers going up, down and sideways. Then I tapped on the numbers with the pen to type out 22 + 44..." only to discover I'd forgotten to draw an equals sign. I quickly drew one in, then tapped it to hear the pen speak "22 + 44 equals 66". It was as if I were running from something in the land of chalk drawings and someone suggested we draw a door so we could escape!

The interface also feels more magical than it would if it were implemented on a tablet PC. This could be a novelty effect — I'm used to paper being static and non-functional and computer screens being reactive — but I think it's also because it feels like the pen is reacting to my physical environment, rather than simply reacting to the way I interact with it. When I interact with a tablet PC, I think of the computer as being the screen (even if the actual CPU is somewhere else). With the Fly, I think of the pen and speaker as being the device, but not the paper. That means even though a tablet PC and the pentop computer might implement the exact same interface, I feel more of an emotional attachment with the pen because it appears to be observing and sharing my external environment and not just the actions I perform directly on the device.

Fly Pentop Computer 

Image: Leapfrog

The NYTimes has a write-up on Leapfrog's Fly Pentop Computer, which essentially merges the Anoto Pen technology with a speaker and what sounds like some very clever games & applications, all wrapped in a $100 pen. Supposedly it's for the 8 to 14-year-old market, but I'm thinking it might be good for this 30-somethinger as well.

(Thanks to Ted for the link.)

Update 11/25/05: I picked one up at Fry's a couple days ago — here're some thoughts on it.

Frappr 

Frappr is a simple cross between flickr and Google Maps: create a group and members (actually, anyone) can post a picture of themselves associated with their zipcode. Simple idea, and quite cute.

For an example, may I suggest the new Docbug Reader's group :).

(Thanks to Del for the link.)

Amazon harvesting natural intelligence 

By way of John Battelle's SearchBlog:

Amazon Mechanical Turk provides a web services API for computers to integrate "artificial, artificial intelligence" directly into their processing by making requests of humans. Developers use the Amazon Mechanical Turk web services API to submit tasks to the Amazon Mechanical Turk web site, approve completed tasks, and incorporate the answers into their software applications. To the application, the transaction looks very much like any remote procedure call: the application sends the request, and the service returns the results. In reality, a network of humans fuels this artificial, artificial intelligence by coming to the web site, searching for and completing tasks, and receiving payment for their work.

The service is legit — http://mturk.amazon.com/ redirects to the main site.

On first blush it sounds similar to OpenMind (which was started by David Stork, a coworker of mine). OpenMind has especially been used to gather human knowledge for training up AIs (especially common-sense knowledge) — I wonder where Amazon expects to go with the idea.

Google Print 

Yesterday Google announced that the first wave of Google Print is up, starting with a large number of books that are in the public domain. (As they say in their PS, see also The Million Book Project's libraries in the US, China and India as well as Project Gutenberg.)

All your base are belong to Google 

Yow. Ars Technica has the low-down on a yet-unannounced Google service called Google Base:

Google Base is Google's database into which you can add all types of content. We'll host your content and make it searchable online for free.

Once again, Google proves they groks that the marginal cost of storage and file transfer is essentially free. By becoming the go-to place for everyone's content they draw more eyeballs for their web ads and position themselves to become the best aggregation service on the Net (if they aren't already).

(via Slashdot)

British National Film Archives online 

Britain's National Archives have started putting their government-produced public information films online, starting with films from 1945-1951. Everything from a 1948 cartoon explaining the benefits of the newly formed National Insurance Act (Britain's welfare system) to a film showing how to use the pedestrian crossing (crosswalk).

Material is released under the Crown Copyright license, which is essentially a non-commercial-use license with the added stipulation that the material is "re-used accurately and not used in a misleading context."

(Thanks to Andy for the link.)

Follow the yellow nubbly road! 

Osaka has great infrastructure for helping the blind find their way. Not only is the city covered in these yellow bumpy paths you can follow with a cane or your foot (with differently shaped bumps at intersections so you can tell where to turn), but they've also got braille signs in all the subway stairwells explaining where this passage leads. The best part is how they put the braille in the best possible place for it to be found just by feeling around: wrapped around the handrail itself.

Jack Radio 

The latest buzz buzz in FM music formats is Jack-FM, a nationally syndicated format that eliminates DJs and replaces them with essentially random shuffle-play (the rough transitions between radically different songs is part of the charm). The playlist is pulled from a library of around 1,200 songs, about 3-4 times that of a traditional station, though all songs have to have been in the top 40 in the last 40 or so years. Jack-FM's website attributes their success to the iPod making people comfortable with shuffle-play:

Random acts of greatness “jack” radio. Several kajillion iPod™ users can’t be wrong. Thanks to the shuffle feature, hearing different styles of music one after another feels completely natural, and desperate radio programmers have taken notice. The “Jack” format—so named for its Everyman inclusiveness—is popping up in every market to save commercial radio from obsolescence.

I'm skeptical about Jack "saving commercial radio from obsolescence" — it sounds more like the blowing of taps to me. Way back when, before the days of top-40 or Clear Channel, DJs actually added value through their extensive record collections and expert knowledge of who the hot new groups were. But that was then, and by eliminating DJs altogether, Jack is declaring that the job music-radio DJs do today can be done just as well and more cheaply by a random-number generator.

That may be true, but I have to wonder if the radio stations embracing this format have thought this cynical line of thinking all the way to its conclusion. If Jack is so wonderful because it emulates my iPod on shuffle play, then why the heck do I need their advertisement-filled, frequency-hoarding broadcast at all? Sure, 1,200 songs is better than 300, but my iPod holds over ten times that many songs, lets me skip songs, lets me pick my own formats and lets me share my playlists with my friends — all ad-free. The only advantages broadcast has over the iPod are expert DJs (which they're eliminating), installed base of radios (which iPod-like technology will eventually match), and the arcane copyright laws that give radio broadcasters a way to legally broadcast without needing to pay the RIAA or recording artists (though they still pay song writers through BMI or ASCAP.) Even in the slow and bloody copyright wars, that third advantage is also slipping away. Today I can fill my iPod from an all-you-can-eat subscription service, from Creative Commons and other legal free-download sites, or from a number of less legal sources, and other sources keep rising. Once it becomes ubiquitous, why would we as a society keep granting exclusive rights to scarce public radio frequencies for such an archaic way to transmit music?

Siemens shows off electrochromic paper-thin display 

Siemens is showing off a paper-thin electrochromic display that they hope will eventually lead to an all-in-one device that uses printing technology to lay down the display, circuits and even the battery. According to the New Scientist:

The display is controlled by a printed circuit and can be powered by a very thin printable battery or a photovoltaic cell. The goal is to be able to create the entire device – the display and its power source - using the same printing method, so that manufacturing costs would be as low as possible. Siemens expects to achieve this by 2007.

Also impressive is that the display cost about £30 (just over $50) per square meter of materials.

Update 5pm: added link to Siemens announcement.

Video iPod 

To the surprise of few, today Steve Jobs announced a Video iPod at his "One More Thing" press conference today. The main iPod now supports H.264 and MPEG-4 video formats, with a capacity of around 150 hours worth on the 60GB. You can also download movie trailers and purchase music videos at the iTunes Music Store for $1.99 each, and it looks like ad-free episodes of shows from ABC and Disney television are coming soon.

(As is traditional after Apple announcements (regardless of how good the news), AAPL is down five and a half percent so far today.)

Update 3:09pm: TV-show purchase is now up, with episodes for $1.99 and a full season for $34.99. And they've got Pixar shorts up for only $1.99 too! (Not sure if JHymn will work with video like it does with audio — I'll try it out tonight.)

Rebranding the MP3 

There's been a lot of buzz about Yahooo!'s new Podcast search engine, and what it means for the "new medium" to have a major search engine buy in like this.

Ignore the fact that podcasting isn't a new medium (it's called audio guys, it's been around a while). It's also not that different from seven years ago when people just linked to MP3s on their webpages, and search engines like Scour.net and Lycos MP3 Search would find them for you. Technologically the only difference is a little bit of XML to help machines know what's being linked, plus a few tweaks (like RSS subscription) that make the experience more user-friendly.

What I think has changed in the past 7 years is the number of people producing and distributing their own amateur and semi-pro content, and the accompanying infrastructure to support them. In 1998 almost all the MP3s available on the web were copyrighted songs people had ripped from their CD collection, and so the RIAA and other members of the content cartel could squash whatever infrastructure cropped up in the name of stamping out piracy. Today there're countless MP3s online that are completely legal to download, and that primes the pump for for inventing the infrastructure to make it even easier. Moreover, piracy has largely gone to the P2P networks, so now MP3s on the web are harder to paint with the sweeping "it's all piracy" brush.

And that all leads to podcasting, which I'm hearing the media describe as "making your own radio programs for broadcast over the net." This is, of course, the big long-term competition for the content cartel — their big-advertising, mass-produced one-size-fits-all model will have trouble competing with thousands of niche narrowcasts that each have a small personal audience. More importantly, podcasting is online audio that finally isn't being linked with piracy — it's good, happy audio on the web, not at all like those nasty pirated MP3s in the previous decade.

And just think, it only took us seven years to get here...

E Ink offers electronic paper display prototype kit 

E Ink just announced it will be offering prototyping kits that include a 6" diagonal, 170 pixels per inch, 4 gray level e-ink display. Like all E Ink displays, it only needs power to change the display, not to maintain the image. The kit also includes a development board with a 400 MHz Gumstix single-board computer as well as I/O boards for MMC, Bluetooth and USB.

No word yet on prices, though their kits page says order forms will be available soon. Kits will begin shipping November 1st.

Update 9/27/05: fixed typo (I'd said it needs power to change the display but not to update it, which makes no sense).

Update 9/29/05: As Andrew points out in the comments, they've now posted their order form and the kit is $3000. Not cheap, especially considering you can get your own Gumstix for $159 and a Sony Librié for $419. (You could also get a Toshiba DCT-100 for just $229, though I believe that's using one of Kend Displays' ChLCD display.)

Theoretical limitation on search engines? 

Lately I've noticed a rise in the number of Google search results that just lead to a bunch of ads plus some automatically-generated content copied from other web pages, rather than pages with the original content I'm looking for. This is the latest step in an ongoing arms race between the search engines (and their users) and so-called search engine optimization companies that try to funnel searchers through to their customer's ad-laden sites rather than going direct to the site they want. The SEOs are essentially using Google's own infrastructure against it, creating Google-hosted blogs, generated using content from (I'm guessing) the results of Google searches, all sprinkled with links to pages containing nothing but Google-supplied Ads.

Google's trying to stop folks from gaming the system like this, but I expect there's some kind of fundamental limit to what can be done to stop it. You could probably even describe it as a theorem:

For any automatically-indexed search engine of sufficient size, it is possible to construct a document that has a high page rank for a given query even though the constructed document adds no useful information beyond that which would have been returned without it.

A corollary would be:

The more complete a search engine is in terms of documents indexed, the lower the relevance of its search results will be in terms of the ratio of documents with original content vs. documents that simply copy information from other pages.

If this does, in fact, wind up being a fundamental theorem for search engines, I have a humble suggestion for what we should name it: Göögel's Incompleteness Theorem.

Wikipedia the (physical) World 

Semapedia is a project to annotate physical locations with 2D barcodes that link to Wikipedia articles. With the Semacode software running on your PDA/cellphone, you scan a barcode and it'll take you to the linked-to article. There've been a lot of attempts at this sort of physical annotation of the world, WorldBoard being one of the earlier ones I remember.

I like the concept in theory, but I'm always disappointed by the quality and variability of the links. Do I really want a link about privacy just because I see a no-tresspassing sign, or about the Hofburg Imperial Palace just because I'm standing there? Perhaps, if I'm in the mood for ironic social commentary or I'm a tourist with an interest in architecture, but most people won't be the right audience for any given link. One man's art is another man's graffiti, and the world-annotation systems I've seen are currently little more than virtual spray paint.

The variability is the real key. If 90% of the tags I come across link to something interesting to me, I'll probably follow every one I see. If only 50% link to something interesting, I might look at the human-readable title printed on the tag and then decide whether I think it likely that the article will be well-written and interest me. If 90% of the tags wind up being useless, I won't even bother reading the title — and then it won't matter that there are 10% that I would have enjoyed if I had bothered to look.

I'm not totally pessimistic about this sort of technology though. With the right combination of filtering (to make tags I don't care about completely invisible), subtlety (to make the tags I might care about still be unobtrusive in case I don't want to be bothered) and community support (to insure relevance to me and to bond me to my community regardless of the link quality), I could see something like this finally taking off.

(Thanks to Eugen Leitl on the Wearables mailing list for the link!)

Fat Pings and Atom Streams 

There's interesting work going on between Brad Fitzpatrick at LiveJournal, Bob Wyman of PubSub and other folks at SixApart (who make the MoveableType blogging software) about making continuous streams of blogging content so large aggregators (like PubSub, Technorati or Google) can get continuous updates from large sources of blog posts like LiveJournal, SixApart or Blogger.

See Brad's post on LJ for the inital proposal, these threads on integrating it with the Atom protocol and the Six Apart Update Stream for developments.

Or, if you feel like playing yourself, type this into a command prompt to see a continuous stream of "No one understands me. Should I dye my hair pink or blue?":

telnet updates.sixapart.com 8081
GET /atom-stream.xml HTTP/1.0 <enter>
<enter>

(Extra points for being the first one to plug it into a screensaver :)

Google blog search 

I've been wondering when Google would get around to this. A few days ago they announced Google Blog Search, which indexes blog entries based on RSS or Atom feeds.

Google's playing catch-up to smaller services like Technorati, but seem to have scooped Yahoo! and MSN, both of whom have been rumored to be coming out with an RSS-feed search "any day now" for months (Yahoo! even briefly revealed a test page before they realized it wasn't being firewalled properly).

One feature Google gets right is that every page includes a link to subscribe to an RSS or Atom feed on that query, essentially turning any search phrase into an aggregator. Technorati has something similar with their watchlists, but you have to create an account and go through their page to create a new standing query. Google just creates the contents on the fly &mash; a big win in terms of ease-of-use since you're likely to most want a standing query after you've just done the search as a regular one.

(Discovered via Political Animal, of all places, but there are also announcements at SixApart and John Battelle's Searchblog.)

Boobs for Bourbon Street! 

One of the folks helping to raise money for the Katrina relief effort is the site Boobs 4 Bourbon Street (it's been slashdotted and is down right now, but check back later). People are donating pictures of their bare breasts (with the website shown in the photo itself, to insure they were taken with full knowledge and consent of how they'd be used), and anyone who donates $5 or more to one of the main relief charities gets an account and password to view them.

From the site:

Click on any of the charities in the right-hand column, go to their donation page, and make an online donation for $5 or more. (Please note: Habitat For Humanity's minimum online donation amount is $10. If you try to make a smaller donation in their form, you'll get a fairly nondescript error message.) Then, once they send you a confirmation email, forward it to us, at verify@boobs4bourbonst.com. At this point, one of our volunteers will see your email, then create an account with which you can access the gallery, and email you with your login information. The username will be the email address that you emailed us from. The password will be randomly-generated. Write it down or print it out or save the email.

To quote my friend Adam, this has got to be the least efficient way to use the Internet to get pictures of boobs since Archie, but hey — it's for charity, and when I checked a couple days ago they'd already raised $3000.

I also note (so you won't think this post is entirely about boobs) that they've got an interesting trade economy going here, where they're providing a service (in this case light-porn) not for cash but for proof that cash was paid to someone else. It'd be great to build up the infrastructure to make this kind of thing easier, much as Software Ransom sites have done for pooling commissions for software (are you listening, PayPal?).

TiddlyWiki 

OK, this makes my head hurt. TiddlyWiki is a self-contained, client-side Wiki written entirely in HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Unlike most wikis, there's no server for a TiddlyWiki — when you download a page you have your own local copy of the entire wiki, and any changes you make affect only that local copy. It's not a collaborative authoring space, at least not in the traditional sense, but it's useful for taking notes or maintaining a set of HTML pages that you later want to upload to a server. I'm impressed by the numbers of features and slickness of the interface given that it's "just" JavaScript (note to self: JavaScript is now a real language). It also has an interesting navigation that's something of a cross between a wiki and a blog, where clicking on a link inserts the relevant post into the main page you're reading. It reminds me of Radio Userland's Live Outline Tool, though unfortunately that includes the fact that I find it easy to get lost in both.

The full implications of this kind of client-side Wiki didn't really hit me until I briefly wondered where I could download a copy, only to realize I already had just by visiting the site. As their instructions point out, just do "Save Webpage As..." (either of their main page or of a blank version) and you've got your own copy, ready to edit.

iPod Nano 

Apple announced their new iPod Nano yesterday — 2 or 4 GB (around 500 or 1000 songs, or around 25,000 photos), with 14 hours battery life, color display and a click-wheel, all squeezed into a 3.5 x 1.6 x 0.27 inch package. That's about 20% of the footprint and only 75% of the thickness of a single standard CD jewelcase! Nicely done.

Hurricane Housing 

MoveOn.org is hoping to use the same infrastructure they've used in the past for political action parties and call-athons to organize temporary housing for refugees from Hurricane Katrina. Check out www.hurricanehousing.org for more details, especially if you live within about 300 miles of the affected areas.

DTV Beta for Mac 

Participatory Culture Foundation has released DTV, an open source (GPL) video player that combines an RSS aggregator with a BitTorrent video player. Currently in beta for OSX, Windows and Linux coming soon. Combine this with their open source Broadcast Machine to create your own channels, or use del.icio.us to add videos you find on the web to your own published channel.

(Props to Noel for the link.)

Chris Schmandt's book available for free download 

Chris Schmandt, the head of MIT Media Lab's Speech Interface Group, has just made a PDF of his now out-of-print 1994 book Voice Communications With Computers: Conversational Systems available for download in PDF form for free off his website.

Chris was one of the readers for my Generals Exams, and naturally this was one of the books on my reading list. It's 12 years old at this point, but most of the issues he talks about are inherent in speech communications regardless of the technology. Highly recommended.

(Thanks to Thad for the link!)

Random factoid of the day: 222 years till Universe-sized hard drive 

Another back-of-the-envelope calculation, inspired by a comment by my friend Beemer:

Atoms in the Universe: 10⁷⁹
Bits on this year's largest hard drive: 500GB = 4 x 10¹² bits
Doubling time for hard drives: 1 year

Years before a single hard drive will store 1 bit for every atom in the Universe at current doubling rates: 222

Warning: past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results.

Great review of metadata in OS X 10.4 (Tiger) 

I just read a great review of Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) over at ars technica. If you're into Macs or finer points of geekery like how file systems should work, especially check out the long discussion on metadata in Tiger.

What about a Google cache on my desk? 

Yesterday I said that within a decade disk space should be cheap enough to put the entire visible web on your desk for under $1000. I think that's actually a pretty conservative estimate, since it assumes a 100 KB average page size, up to an order of magnitude higher than some estimates.

Here's another back-of-the envelope: let's say we wanted the equivalent of Google's webcache on your desktop (that is, all the HTML but no images). Another way to calculate it starts with the fact that the 2003 update to Berkeley's How Much Info? study estimated that in 2002 the web was only 167 Terabytes total, with only 30 TB as HTML (69 TB when you include images). Assuming 75% compression, that's just around 8 TB. That same year a 2002 OCLC study calculated that the total number of web pages was only increasing by about 5% per year (with the number of sites actually shrinking, but the number of pages per site growing). That rate had been decreasing ever since the explosion in the mid '90s, but let's assume growth became a steady 5% and will stay at that rate for the next few years. (There are a lot of assumptions going on here, but the nice thing about these kinds of curves is that even if my numbers are off by a factor of two somewhere, so long as disk keeps increasing at the same rate that crossover point only changes by one year.)

Now we've got two trends, and just need to find the intersection point for the price we want:

So given a few assumptions, we'll be able to cache all the raw text on the public web for under $1000 (disk cost) within 3 years!

When do I get the web in my pocket? 

Some time ago I asked how much longer before I can have the Web in my pocket. Let's try a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation:

A paper from January 2005 calculates the publicly indexable Web (the part easily accessible to search engine web-crawlers) as being around 11.5 billion pages. Estimates on average webpage size seem to be all over the map, but let's figure around 100 KB per page, for a total of around a petabyte (one million Gig) for today's indexed web. (I'm assuming text and images, but ignoring other media.)

Disk these days is going for less than 50 cents per Gig, so enough disk to store your own personal Google (and then some) costs around $500,000. With compression you can probably cut that in half. The price of disk is also falling by a factor of two every 12 months, so assuming no major jumps or snags in the disk-price curve, in a little less than a decade we can expect to hold the equivalent of today's indexed web for less than $1000.

Now of course, in that time the web will continue to grow, so we may no longer be satisfied with our measly petabyte-on-the-desk, but I figure the amount of human-generated Web content has a much slower growth rate than our disk-space curve. The number of web sites actually shrank between 2001 and 2002, and though it now seems to be growing again there's only so much content that human beings can create in a day. The real question I have is whether in a decade anyone will see having access to the whole web as being all that interesting — I could easily see the majority of people losing interest in the surface web in favor of personal deep-web niches. The only reason I want the whole web in my pocket is because it's too hard for me to filter out in advance the 99.99% of the web that'll never be of interest to me — the closer we get to that kind of pruning, the less disk we need and the higher-quality the experience will be.

Update 8/2/05: doing a different back-of-the-envelope estimate leads to being able to store a compressed-HTML cache (no images) on less than $1000 worth of disk within 3 years...

The camera adds 10 lbs... 

...and Photoshop takes them right back off.

(Thanks to Spider for the link...)

Microsoft giving grants for Personal Lifetime Storage projects 

Microsoft Research has announced a Request for Proposals for projects in relating to their Digital Memories (Memex) research kit, in the context of "personal lifetime storage." Microsoft's inspiration (and probably the inspiration for everyone else working in this area too, at least indirectly) is Vannevar Bush's 1945 article As We May Think, in which he famously described a kind of personal library-in-a-desk he called the memex:

Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and to coin one at random, ``memex'' will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.

MSR expects to give 6-9 awards to college and university projects, up to a max of $50,000 per award, and recipients would also be given a SenseCam wearable camera and software from the MyLifeBits, VIBE and Phlat research projects at Microsoft Research. Strings are minimal — they expect semiannual progress reports, want it presented at at least one of their workshops and expect the project to be either dedicated to the public domain or released under an open license such as the BSD license.

New digital cinema standard to use JPEG 2000 compression 

Yesterday a consortium of the major movie studios announced final specs for a new standard digital format for movie theaters. The specification uses JPEG 2000 video compression, which (though it happened before I started working there) I'm proud to say largely came out of work performed at my lab.

The big advantage of JPEG 2000 is that you can "pull out" bits from a code stream to get different resolutions — in this case a 4K distribution (1,302,083 bytes per frame at 48FPS) and a 2K distribution (651,041 bytes per frame at 48 FPS) can both be generated on-the-fly from the same file, just by discarding segments of the stream.

(Thanks to Mike for the link.)

Fujutsu shows bendable e-paper display 

I'm a little late on this news, but last week Fujitsu announced a new bendable e-paper technology. EE Times has the most complete technical description I've seen on it:

The display is a passive-matrix, reflective type cholesteric liquid crystal display. Two 3.8-inch diagonal QVGA prototypes, a monochrome display and a color version able to display 512 colors, were shown.

...

Differing from widely used flat displays that have color filters consisting of red, green and blue pixels, the paper display has a three layered structure in total about 0.8 mm thick. One layer consists of two 0.125 mm-thick films sandwiching liquid crystal. Cholesteric crystals in each layer are twisted in a certain pitch to reflect only red, green or blue light respectively.

Images on the screen can be changed with 10-milliwatts to 100-milliwatts depending on scanning speed.

(Thanks to John for the link...)

Google Maps & Virtual Earth 

Microsoft and Google both come out with new versions of free online satellite mapping software this past weekend. Google Maps has added the "hybrid view" that lets you see your driving directions laid out on the map itself, which is the feature I've wanted ever since they came out with satellite-view. Microsoft has just released their web-based Virtual Earth, which doesn't yet support driving directions (coming soon I'm sure) but does include a nice (dare I say "Google Maps-like"?) scrollable interface and switching between maps and aerial photography. They've an interface for keeping track of multiple locations on a scratch pad, an API for adding your own way-points on the URL line, and a cute zoom-in animation.

One fun feature of Virtual Earth is that some parts of the US have incredible resolution: compare Seattle's space needle from Virtual Earth and Google Maps to see what I mean. Unfortunately, Virtual Earth's image coverage is pretty spotty. In spite of the name, it only covers the USA — I'm guessing they're just using USGS publicly available images right now. Also, for many areas they're using very old black-and-white images that they've then overlaid with color for roads and parks. This leads to a few embarrassing misses like the fact that their map shows Apple Computer's Corporate HQ has yet to be built (I didn't see any horse-and-buggies on the streets though, so it can't be too old).

Jargon watch 

According to a Data Memo by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 29% of online Americans have a good idea what phishing means, 13% what podcasting is, and only 9% know what RSS feeds are. Over half knew the terms adware, internet cookies, spyware, firewall and spam.

Of course, the real question in my mind isn't whether people know what phishing means, but whether they know that regardless of what it's called the 22 "You must change your PayPal password!" emails they have in their inbox are attempts at fraud. Still, it'll be interesting to see how these terms spread in the next six months or so.

(Thanks to Rowan for the link.)

PhotoMuse 

"Power House Mechanic" (1920) by Lewis Hine

The New York Times story on PhotoMuse.org, a collaboration between the George Eastman House and International Center of Photography Alliance. (The site is currently overwhelmed, but they've got a sampler up at the moment.) From the article:

While there are now dozens of growing digital databases of photography on the Web, many - like Corbis and Getty Images - are commercial sites that do not allow the public unfettered access to their collections. The Photomuse site will join others, like the digital collections of the Library of Congress, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television in Bradford, England, that are beginning to create what amounts to a huge, free, virtual photography museum on the Web.

...

Anthony Bannon, the director of Eastman House, said one of the biggest hurdles encountered by the project - after overcoming the initial cultural resistance of both institutions to share their collections and expertise - has been converting the images of both Eastman and the center. onto a single computer system. (So far, he said, Eastman has digitized almost 140,000 of its photos and center about 30,000.)

"It's not just like pushing a button and the images slide over," he said, adding that copyright issues with many photographers could also keep many images off the Web for years. "Some are generous and understand the positive result by having the images seen on our Web site but others are worried about losing opportunities for revenue," Mr. Bannon said. "All of us are still learning about how the Web can be used, I think."

It's nice to see traditionally conservative institutions opening up to the idea that on the Web, sharing your art, knowledge or expertise freely often pays you back far better than hording it.

Japanese graphical search engine 

MarsFlag is a new search engine in Japan (went live in March) that provides links as thumbnail images of returned results instead of text, with larger-version pop-ups when you rollover with the mouse. Supports full-text search (e.g. this search on wearable computer) as well as pictorial topic areas like movies, fashion magazines and motercycles.

According to Internet Watch [JP → EN], the search engine at least in part determines results ranking using bookmarks kept by the 35,000 subscribers to the Mark Agent web-based bookmarking service that the company also owns. MarsFlag claims this helps thwart attempts to gain page rank by creating link farms, a process called search engine optimization. (Presumably that'll only work until SEO companies start generating fake Mark Agent accounts...)

Panasonic shows off color eBook prototype 

Tech-On reports that Matsushita (Panasonic) showed off a new prototype color eBook reader with a 5.6", 210 points-per-inch display at the NE Technology Summit 2005 event held in Tokyo yesterday. Given that their current grayscale Σ book uses a bistable display made by Kent Displays, I would hazard a guess that their prototype is using Kent's new color ChLCD display (but that's just a guess). Bistable displays like the ChLCD and eInk's microcapsule display (used in the Sony LIBRIé) take power to change an image but not to maintain it, so they're incredibly low power for low-framerate applications like eBooks.

(via engadget by way of Steve)

Google maps pedometer 

Another nice Google Maps reuse: gmapPedometer. Chart your bike/running/walking/tourism route and see how far you've gone (not to mention get a pretty satellite image, and a URL you can use to bookmark or email to friends).

(Thanks to Jill for the link!)

Location-based apps 

The theme for NPUC this year was The future of portable computing, so naturally there was a lot of talk about location-based applications. Ian Smith's talk on social mobile computing especially focused on using location. Personally I'm getting more and more skeptical about location-based apps. They've been right around the corner for a good decade now, and I'm starting to wonder if location-based apps are like video conferencing — something that sounds like it should be a hit but once they're implemented nobody seems to care.

That said, I think if there's ever going to be a successful location-aware application (outside of the ubiquitous museum-tourguide app) it'll be one that uses location as an excuse to socialize. I'm not sure whether the final winners will look more like Dodgeball, GeoCaching, moblogs, or a cross between LiveJournal and the geospatial web (or all of these), but I'm pretty confident that when you scratch the surface the real point won't be location, it'll be human-to-human interaction that just happens to use location as the medium.

That also fits my general rule of thumb: The killer app is always communications. (That or sex, which is really a subset of communications.)

Technorati tag: npuc2005

Doorbells becoming obsolete? 

Interesting tidbit from Ian Smith (Intel Research) here at NPUC 2005, who says that Beki Grinter at Georgia Tech predicts that within a generation doorbells in Europe will be obsolete. Apparently teens in Europe SMS or phone their friends instead of ringing the doorbell so they don't have to risk talking with parents.

Technorati tag: npuc2005

Spark Fun Electronics 

Quick resource tip: Spark Fun Electronics is a cool little online electronics & prototyping-supply shop. Good descriptions & spec sheets with the hardware hacker in mind. (Thanks to Thad for the link!)

No iPod settlement for me... 

I tested the battery on my iPod yesterday to see if I qualified for the $50 store credit Apple's offering to settle a class-action lawsuit. No dice for me — my 3-year-old first-generation 10 Gig iPod (specced to last 10 hours) does, in fact, still last around 9.5 hours continuous play from a full charge.

The Party Party 

About a year ago I mentioned how the "virtual band" The Bots had put up a public-domain database of G.W. Bush audio clips to help would-be remixers get started. Their own rap Fuzzy Math is fun, but IMO succeeds mostly on the novelty of hearing GW saying things he'd never cop to in real life. The mixes over at The Party Party (by the band (me)™)) take GW mixing to the next level. The music stands on its own, and they turn the inherent choppiness of the mixing process into an advantage by fitting it with the natural rhythm of the music. (Be sure to especially check out My name is RX, a cross between Bush, Sympathy for the Devil and Slim Shady.)

Fun with Google Maps & Posters 

A couple fun tools that've crossed my path the last few days:

• GMapTrack: Make your own paths and waypoints in Google Maps (via Nivi)
• Rastorbator: Rastorize images into PDF files, for printing wall-sized posters (via Jofish)

(I was going to post GMerge as well, but it's been taken down after receiving what has to be the most friendly cease-and-decist letter I've ever read...)

UbiComp Gaming Workshop 

This year's UbiComp 2005 conference will include a one-day workshop on Ubiquitous Computing, Entertainment and Games:

The theme of this workshop is ubiquitous computing entertainment, playful social networking, and games. Our goals are to provide a productive forum in which international researchers, members of the entertainment industry, game players, game designers, and game publishers can discuss key issues in ubiquitous gaming, present and future uses of ubiquitous computing that create compelling, playful and socially beneficial gaming experiences, and to facilitate an exchange of ideas that will allow ubiquitous games to break out of their current “niche” and into the mainstream.

The workshop will be September 11th, 2005 in Tokyo.

A little bit of friction 

The PostSecret blog is a "community art project where people mail-in their secrets on one side of a homemade postcard." Some are thoughtful, some disturbing, some kinda silly, but almost all are high quality. I think Sarah Boxer's NYT Arts Review nails why that's the case:

The Web site gives people simple instructions. Mail your secret anonymously on one side of a 4-by-6-inch postcard that you make yourself. That one constraint is a great sieve. It strains out lazy, impulsive confessors.

For PostSecret, you write, type or paste your secret on a postcard, and then, if you want, decorate the card with drawings or photographs. Next the stamp and then the mailbox. Yes, it's work to confess. And it should be, if only for the sake of the person who might be listening.

That's a lesson we need to remember as we design for more and more frictionless communication — sometimes a little friction is exactly what you want. (A special thanks to my dad for the link.)

Cone of silence 

Coming next month to a store near you (via the New York Times):

The cone of silence, called Babble, is actually a device composed of a sound processor and several speakers that multiply and scramble voices that come within its range. About the size of a clock radio, the first model is designed for a person using a phone, but other models will work in open office space.

I'm imagining all sorts of cute hacks you could do with this. I especially want to set one up to cancel out my speech and simultaneously play music or pre-recorded/synthesized speech over it — turn your whole conversation into a badly dubbed movie!

Where to go in Australia 

I don't think I've ever seen a more complete, well laid out website devoted entirely to mapping every public toilet on an entire continent. Find toilets based on address or GPS location, plan your trip around public toilets, register for My Toilet Map or even receive a monthly newsletter. Brought to you by Australia's National Continence Management Strategy.

Tesseract 

My brother is finishing up his Masters of Fine Arts at SUNY Buffalo, and just recently debuted his main dissertation project: a 20-minute experimental film about Eadweard Muybridge called tesseract (downloadable here).

Even to my relatively untrained eye it's a beautiful piece (it just won the award for Best Photography at the Jutro Filmu international film festival in Warsaw), but the part that's most interesting to me is how he's applying ideas from Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics to film. Take a look and see for yourself.

Interesting information flow-control models 

I've run into a few interesting models for information flow-control in the past months:

• The Chronicle of Higher Education gives paid subscribers full access to their archives and lets them email / blog links to those articles which expire after five days. That gives them the advantage of word-of-mouth draw to their articles while still limiting the number of people who feel compelled to cut-and-paste repost their articles on their own sites.
• The online museum site Rhizome.org lets you follow any link from an external website into their site (for example, this one) but any link you type directly into your browser, follow from email or click from their own site redirects you to a "you must become a member" page. (They also open their site to non-members every Friday.) They're just redirecting any request that either has no referral header or that has Rhizome.org as the referrer.
• I should also mention how the New York Times allows blogs to create non-expiring links to Times articles (that is, they don't become subscriber-only or pay-per-view after a week). Unfortunately, the link generator over at BlogSpace is down at the moment (as is the rest of BlogSpace), so I can't show an example...

All three cases are creating two classes of info-users: people who can disseminate their information (paid subscribers, plus people who read the Times when it's still fresh) and consumers who can read what the first class of people point to but can't go further without paying. While it's a little Tom Sawyerish to essentially force people to pay to drive potential new subscribers to your site, I can see the basic model working if the balance is gotten right and fit the content well. At the very least, it's nice to see models that are more subtle than the all-free / ad-based / subscriber-based triple that's so common today.

Shmoogle 

Concerned about the influence Google's PageRank algorithm has in determining what information people see? Think that ranking pages by how many people link to them isn't objective so much as automated mob rule? Want a search engine for people who don't want to just follow the herd, or just want to see the dominant paradigm get a little more subverted?

If so, then you'll be interested in Shmoogle, the Google-randomizer developed by Tsila Hassine. Shmoogle forwards your query on to Google and then randomizes the results, presenting them in the same no-nonsense interface you'd expect from Google along with the original rank of each result. Shmoogle is more of an art project than a practical alternative to Google, designed to encourage us to question whether "everyone else thinks this is good, so you should too" is really the best assumption upon which to base the library of first resort. Random order is at least diversifying, but to me it seems so arbitrary — and has me thinking of all sorts of alternatives:

• Dictoogle: rank sites in the order the elite think you should see.
• Diversoogle: give higher rank to those that have the fewest incoming links, in an effort to increase diversity and raise up websites less fortunate than the more popular ones.
• Novegle: give higher rank to sites that you've never seen before, in the interest of keeping up with the now. (I was sure I found it using this query just yesterday!)
• Capitoogle: give higher rank to those who pay for it (we've got this one already).
• Confugle: Instead of giving results directly related to your search, give results that are only metaphorically related. Include a Wiki for users to write their best guess as to why a page was included. (Actually, this one is probably already commonplace as well...)
• Voyeugle: See the results from the previous person's query instead of your own.

If you can think of more variations feel free to comment...

Family Movie Act as anti-censorship law 

Ed Felton argues that the new Family Movie Act (passed by Congress on Tuesday and likely to be signed by the President) actually protects free speech rather than, as some might claim, protects censorship. (The act, for those who haven't heard, makes it legal to edit out limited portions of a non-pirated home-viewed movie at the direction of a member of that household — so it's OK to make a DVD player that optionally skips all the sex scenes, scenes with Jar-Jar Binx, or for that matter the sex scenes with Jar-Jar Binx.)

I agree with Ed here — empowering individuals to choose what they want to watch or not watch doesn't promote censorship any more than movie reviews or the TV remote control do. The only case that would trouble me is if there were a systemic bundling of edits — for example if the only anti-violence filter for a movie also filtered out all the sex scenes. But given that such bundling already happens in the editing room of the movie itself and given that there will likely be competition in this arena (baring broad patents) I don't see that scenario as likely.

Random factoid of the day 

Google has indexed around 8 billion web pages, total.

The National Archives in Washington D.C. archives around 100 million paper pages per year.

Nearly 15 trillion copies are produced on copiers, printers, and multi-function machines per year.

Update 4/20/05: fixed Google stat from 8 million to 8 billion (what's a few orders of magnitude among friends?) and added copier stat. (Thanks to Mort & Beemer for keeping me honest.)

Graph paper PDFs 

Another thing I wish I knew about long ago: http://printfreegraphpaper.com/. Good source of PDFs for graph paper in a variety of types, measures and pitches. Prints in faint grey. (By way of the Seattle Times technology section.)

Doodle Writer on steroids 

Remember the Doodle Writer, the writing-desk toy with the magnetic stylus that lets kids (or you) write without making a mess? Well, Pilot has the same thing in whiteboard size. It's called the CleanWriter Chalkless Board, and it's mainly being marketed as a whiteboard replacement for clean rooms. A coworker of mine just picked one up for the new playroom he's setting up for his two-year-old — I'll post an update when I find out how she likes it. (I know I'd think it was way cool at age two — or even age 35.)

Craigslist meets Google Maps 

Nice piece of glue by Paul Rademacher, combining Google Maps with Craigslist to produce a great integrated service. This is exactly what I wish I'd had when I was looking for a house all last year. (Thanks to Adam for the link!)

Blog without fear 

EFF has posted a short paper on how to blog without getting fired, breaking it down roughly into (1) blog pseudonymously, (2) limit your audience and (3) know your (lack of) legal rights.

It's unfortunate that (4) come to a reasonable agreement with management about what's acceptable wasn't even in the running. That's a tricky negotiation though, both because once you broach the subject it's much harder to go back to being anonymous and because your management might feel OK about looking the other way but when pressed might feel the need to say no rather than yes. And when it comes to protecting themselves from upper management or angry stockholders should your blog embarrass the company, they're probably right.

I'm of two minds when it comes to pseudonymous writing. On the one hand, I still want more choice of soft walls when it comes to managing what I write. Mailing lists and things like LiveJournal's friends lists are good starts, but what I really want is a publish-this-to-everyone-except-those-who-would-get-me-in-trouble-for-what-I-wrote button. But on the other hand, I can't help but see such a button as a kind of cowardly way out. Maybe it just stirs some deep emotion implanted during half-listened to high-school discussions of Thoreau, but isn't the measure of a writer, at least in some small way, just how much trouble his writing gets him into?

Next step in the anti-comment-spam arms race 

Comments are working after being down for a day, now that I've finished installing MT-Keystrokes, the latest weapon in the anti-comment-spam arms race. It's a plug-in that uses Javascript to detect whether a person has typed something on the form prior to submission — it'll be pretty simple for spammers to code around, but it may give me a month respite in the mean time. (Note that this also means you'll need Javascript enabled to post comments... shouldn't be a problem for the one or two of you who comment every month, and hopefully it'll be slightly more of a problem for the hundred or so spambots that try to post and clog my filter box.)

Movable Type has so much effort going into trying to block spam — I wish they'd put even half that effort into making a half-decent interface for just deleting comments in bulk...

The map is not the territory 

It's interesting how the Google satellite pictures differ ever so slightly from the Google map.

On second thought, it could be that the map is correct and the satellite images are skewed to locally fit the Google perspective. Maybe the map is the territory after all!

I can see my house from here! 

Google just upped the ante again with Google Satellite. Satellite images curtsey of Digital Globe and EarthSat.

As a side-note, the Google Maps URL includes GPS coordinates, so given a street address you can get both GPS coords and satellite map quickly and easily. You can also just erase the part from q=Blah+blah& part of the URL to get a nice clean satelite image, or just add &t=k to an existing Google Maps URL to turn it into a satellite image. (I really hope that doesn't become an issue for some well-meaning panic-stricken patriot who thinks terrorists couldn't get that info quickly and easily in dozens of other ways — I always missed that GPS feature when it was taken out of earlier mapping software.)

Update 7:40pm: Note that you need to click on "Link to this page" in the upper right-hand corner to get the full URL to show up in the address bar.

Dovetailing tools together 

OK, this amused me enough I had to share. My fraternity brother Nivi just lost his voice, so he went and purchased a nice-sounding text-to-speech voice for his Mac at Cepstral and piped its output into Skype with Soundflower. Voilà — instant TTS phone.

I remember David Ross once told a story about how the Model T Ford (nicknamed the "Tin Lizzy") was adapted to all sorts of things unexpected things, from winching wagons to pumping water. The key was the car's simplicity: it was just a motor on wheels, and it didn't take an expert to that motor for something besides driving. It's a lesson that keeps repeating itself: tools made up of simple, powerful components with straightforward interfaces for linking the pieces together find their own new uses.

OurMedia.org 

I've often heard (and sometimes said) that there are three possible outcomes to the copyright wars:

1. The Content Cartel manages to stuff the djinni back in the bottle and reinstate themselves as gatekeepers. The Internet dream gets twisted back into pay-per-view with email.
2. A citizen revolt against congress's constant erosion of fair use, free speech and free market to keep the Cartel's lobbyists fat and happy. We regain the rights to our own culture, but only after much blood has been spilled on the field and in the courts.
3. The Content Cartel keeps their pocket congress-critters and enact even more draconian copyright laws, only to discover that the more restricted a medium is the less it can compete with the new liberated content model.

OurMedia.org (just released in Alpha) is another step forward towards making the third scenario a reality. It's a new web service that's offering to host any sort of creative media (including audio & video). For free. Forever. You own your own copyright, you choose your own license.

This is similar to what The Internet Archive does, and in fact the IA is providing free storage and bandwidth for OurMedia's media files. OurMedia is focusing much more on the general pro/am community though, and includes a free blog & Wiki (all based on Drupal), community-based rating and comment systems and plans for many more social-network support plans.

(Thanks to Seth Finkelstein at Infothought for the link.)

LinkBack for OSX 

LinkBack looks pretty sweet:

LinkBack is an open source framework for Mac OS X that helps developers integrate content from other applications into their own. A user can paste content from any LinkBack-enabled application into another and reopen that content later for editing with just a double-click. Changes will automatically appear in the original document again when you save.

Looks like it goes about 90% of the way towards the convenience of editable embedded objects, without all the problems associated with that last 10% of trying to get everything to actually be edited in a window within the embedded document. It's also interesting that this is an open-source project, spearheaded by 3rd-party software developers Nisus, OmniGroup and Blacksmith rather than by Apple itself.

LinkBack is currently being integrated into Nisus Writer Express, OmniGraffle, OmniOutliner, ChartSmith, Stone Create, Border and a plug-in has just been released to paste LinkBack data into Keynote 2.

(Thanks to Nivi for the link!) Posted by bug to Media Technology at 9:23 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack