A small step for the medium. A giant leap for mediakind.

Tim Bray writes...

Jon Udell is really on a roll. He more or less singlehandedly invented screencasting (I first noticed here), and I guess I’m about the last person in the world to have visited his Walking Tour of Keene, NH, which combines Google Maps and GPS and other assorted magic... in case I’m not the last, don’t you be. Something new is happening here.

And he's right. These things ("Interactive Screencasts ?") are not just trying to approximate radio, or a movie. They mark the beginning of a new dynamic video medium with its own integrity and esthetic and with features that cannot be duplicated, in traditional streaming media. That is, I think the what we see Jon doing in these Screencasts --interacting with a dynamic stream of web-mediated activities--is the real emerging phenomena. The Screencasts themselves are "merely" wonderful records of mankinds first steps in a new medium. (Like the video of Neil Armstrong's first steps on the moon, if you will.) (You have to squint to see this in the play-within-the-play of this movie and its predecessor, in which Jon zooms in and out on the map's scale, even as the animation plays.)

Paris Hilton as social disease

Bill Bumgarner offers a nice analysis of mass meme reproduction.

If anything, the Paris Hilton Phoneplosion seems to have confirmed that information wants to be free. That link is actually very interesting in that it delves into the history of the phrase and concept.

It would seem that the economy works something like this:

• A piece of marketable information is obtained. Ethically or not is irrelevant. Hell, whether or not it really happened may not be relevant, either.
• The person obtaining it brags about it in a relatively public forum. This used to often be solely to news agencies of one ilk or another. Now, it is often on any of a number of cracking/phreaking related community sites.
• The information is eventually revealed as either proof of the crack or pursuit of the story, depending on forum. Around this time, money exchanges hands -- either someone packages the information and offers "girls gone wild" style "see celebrity X in compromising position" products (as happened in this case) or a news agency pays money to "own" the story.
• If it is widely considered "newsworthy", the story breaks through channels like DrudgeReport as a "developing story". This creates a frenzy of online interest. For more niche stories, there are other channels of disclosure such as SlashDot, various rumor sites, celbrity oriented sites like gawker, and -- of course -- porn sites.
• If there was any previous event-- such as the Paris Porn Tape-- that could be associated with this event, it is repackaged and sold and/or displayed along with the new event. What is old is new again.
• Now, about 24 hours into the new economy, Google's indexing engine starts producing useful hits. So does Google News, if the story is hitting the press. Once this happens, much wider coverage is sure to follow.
• At this point, the folks in step #3 that are selling the product are likely making some serious cash. It would be interesting to see a graph of sales over time correlated to various disclosure events. At the same time, the content starts popping up in the mainstream; monologues on late night TV, Fark style story repositories, etc...
• People continue to pay for the content, yet-- at the same time-- the content becomes more easily found through free channels. Sales decline, views decline, interest declines.
• ....
• Weeks or months later, the legal system actually starts to make noise in regards to suing for damages, claims against ownership or applying criminal charges. By this time, the event has largely been forgotten within the cultural hive mind and most of the initial events surrounding disclosure-- the pieces of information most important to the legal action-- are now buried in log files, hazy memories or otherwise obscured by the weeks of 'fast culture' events that have occurred since.

So, it appears that an entire economic niche comes into being and fully matures within about 72 hours. Once the market has been established, there is so little cost to keeping the product-- pure information-- on the market that the "buy a snap of Paris's Private life" sites will be with us until taken down simply through someone forgetting to migrate it to a new server.

Come on, people. Can't we do better than default passwords for security products?

The New York Times > Technology > Circuits > On the Net, Unseen Eyes:
Oh, and by the way. The focal case in the article concerns security cameras installed in a high school girls' locker room.

"'Just to give some perspective, we have delivered close to half a million cameras, and a Google search produces only a few hundred of them,' Mr. Nilsson said. He acknowledges that default passwords to many camera systems, including those of Axis, are frequently traded over the Internet. Nevertheless, he maintains, Axis cameras are secure against accidental intrusion.

But protecting against accident is not the same as protecting against a deliberate invasion, Mr. Chalos said. 'The images were protected only by the software's default username and password, which the school had never changed,' he said. "

Microsoft: Getting from "R" to "D", and from US to PRC

Microsoft: Getting from "R" to "D"

Their idea: a new type of organization designed to bridge the gap between "R" and "D" and in the process overcome many of the product development bottlenecks and geographic and cultural differences that impede today’s global corporations.

Microsoft’s Advanced Technology Center (ATC) opened in November 2003 with 20 employees and a couple of projects. By late last year, after receiving more than 30,000 résumés from around China and sparking keen demand among Microsoft’s business divisions, it had around 100 employees, with some 17 major projects and scores of minor ones on its books; this year, the ATC is set to double in size. In the next few years, the center expects to be the key technology transfer point for a host of new products, from Web-search technologies to mobile applications and home entertainment systems. On the strength of these innovations, Hongjiang Zhang, the center’s charter director, hopes to provide a powerful alternative to Microsoft’s traditional strategy of creating products in the U.S., spiraling into Europe, and then adapting them for the Chinese market. “China is still emerging, but China is no longer just a follower,” he says. “They are starting to lead.”

Given the size and "foreignness" of the Chinese market this makes great sense for Microsoft. But if that market becomes the world center of technical innovation, the American Era may end.

Web-Reality Interpenetration Art

Access by Marie Sester

Access

(2003) 4'25"
Marie Sester Project Page | Add Webcast to My Artbox

Choose one to view this video selection:
Macintosh: Real 56kbs (modem) | Real 256kbs (DSL)
Windows: Microsoft 56kbs (modem) | Microsoft 256kbs (DSL)

Marie Sester's Access is a public art installation that applies web, computer, sound and lighting technology in which a robotic spotlight controlled by web-users tracks individuals in public spaces. An acoustic beam system directs sounds onto the same tracked persons, projecting audio that only he/she can hear. The individual does not know who is tracking him/her or why he/she is being tracked. Nor is he/she aware of being the only person among the public hearing the sound. The tracker doesn't know his/her action triggers sound towards the target. In effect, both the tracker and the tracked are in a paradoxical communication loop.

adaptive path � ajax: a new approach to web applications

adaptive path � ajax: a new approach to web applications
Jesse James Garrett gives a name to "Asynchronous JavaScript + XML" and says it represents a fundamental shift in what’s possible on the Web.

The biggest challenges in creating Ajax applications are not technical. The core Ajax technologies are mature, stable, and well understood. Instead, the challenges are for the designers of these applications: to forget what we think we know about the limitations of the Web, and begin to imagine a wider, richer range of possibilities.

It’s going to be fun.

Planet Python

Planet Python: Patrick Logan writes,

"I teach a 'whole team' Agile/XP course a half dozen times a year. I emphasize values a much as practices. Communication is the value at the top of the list. We also spend a significant bit of time discussing how to adopt XP. My first (and often repeated) message is, if you can only take one thing out of this course then take the benefits of 'clear communication with your whole team' into whatever practices you do choose.

Not only is communication the most important value it is also the easiest thing to adopt as an individual under any circumstances. Build relationships.

Discovery Channel :: News :: Report Fuels Debate on Mars Life

Feb. 17, 2005 —While evidence for microbial life on Mars mounts, far more work needs to be done before any conclusions can be made, the head of NASA's astrobiology center said Thursday.

In an interview with Discovery News, Michael Mumma said he has been unable to find any scientist studying methane readings on Mars who is familiar with a research paper, supposedly submitted to Nature for review, that reportedly concludes there is strong evidence for present-day life on Mars.

Nature will not comment on papers under review for publication.

Discovery Channel :: News :: Report Fuels Debate on Mars Life

Discovery Channel :: News :: Report Fuels Debate on Mars Life

Feb. 17, 2005 —While evidence for microbial life on Mars mounts, far more work needs to be done before any conclusions can be made, the head of NASA's astrobiology center said Thursday.

In an interview with Discovery News, Michael Mumma said he has been unable to find any scientist studying methane readings on Mars who is familiar with a research paper, supposedly submitted to Nature for review, that reportedly concludes there is strong evidence for present-day life on Mars.

Nature will not comment on papers under review for publication.

Wi-Fi Networking News

If big business is against them municipal networks must be a good idea
Glenn Fleishman is on a roll

Let’s just cut to the chase: municipal networks must be a viable threat or why the pushback?: Why are incumbent telecommunications firms and cable operators so afraid of municipal networks? They must work or they wouldn’t be spending tens of millions of dollars in lobbying and advertising to fight them. You have the touching daily reports of Comcast and Verizon, just to take two examples from today’s New York Times, weeping over how the taxpayers’ dollars will be wasted, how the municipalities can’t possibly understand how hard it is to run networks—news flash: running an electrical utility is tough, too, fellas—and how the whole project will go down in flames.

It fills me with such civic virtue to know that giant telecommunications and cable firms are so full of ruth and kindness that they extend their gaze down to the level of mere towns and cities, their beneficent knowledge of business, ethics, and operational efficiency bestowed upon grateful citizens.

I also enjoyed....

A little thought experiment: let’s pretend broadband was electricity: The Previous Millennium Research Council today released a report that strongly opposes the entry of municipally owned entities into electrical power generation, distribution, and delivery. The PMRC’s report, sent out by telegraph to business centers around this great country, is dated Nov. 1895, although it will take several weeks for sufficient copies to be printed and distributed by rail to business centers.

Electricity is too important a resource for America’s future to be left in the hands of cities and towns, the council argues, which are inefficient enterprises that take profits from industry in their pursuit of ever-greater control of the flow of capital within their borders. “How big may these so-called public utilities grow in their efforts to stifle free enterprise and increase the size of government?” the report asks.

Groupware Bad

Groupware Bad: " The trick you want to accomplish is that when one person is using your software, it suddenly provides value to that person and their entire circle of friends, without the friends having had to do anything at all. Then, later, you pull the friends into the fold: if one of them starts using the software, they become their own hub, and get the benefit they have already witnessed from a distance.

"

LazyWeb

Email to Ical

LazyWeb, why can't I forward an email to a server, have the server extract event information, and have the email come back as clickable event for ical?

Cybercash on Vacation

A piece of the action (a book to check out)

Joseph Nocera, author of A Piece of the Action, a history of the credit card industry, says digital currency is facing “a chicken-and-egg question” but points out that credit cards encountered the same problem, and that their acceptance took decades. In fact, 2003 was the first year credit cards and other electronic systems carried more payments than bank checks.

As they come to appreciate just how long the road ahead will likely be, some financial cryptographers are searching for niches where they can flourish in the short term. Take, for example, Waltham, MA-based startup Peppercoin, the brainchild of MIT computer scientists Sylvio Micali and Ron Rivest. Peppercoin is attempting to specialize in very small sums (see “The Web’s New Currency,” December 2003).One of its bigger initiatives is developing a cryptographic system that would enable people to use their credit cards at parking meters, an application that would be prohibitively expensive for the traditional credit card network, which has a minimum transaction fee of about a quarter. If Peppercoin’s technology can cut transaction costs enough, it can capture this market and also make it possible for people to spend small amounts online.

Ned Batchelder: February 2005

Ned Batchelder: February 2005: Sand painting
This is Ned Batchelder speaking, but he's exactly right. Don't miss this.

I haven't seen anyone do this before: painting with sand as a stage performance. Ferenc Cako stands over a glass plate, making images in sand with his hands. Each image gives way to the next in waves of curves and shadows. It's quite a virtuoso performance. The subtlety he manages with such crude tools is amazing. "

A Conversation with Alan Kay

A Conversation with Alan Kay:

A wonderful interview; I really admire Kay's attitude, not to mention his brilliance.

SF So Smalltalk is to Shakespeare as Excel is to car crashes in the TV culture?

AK No, if you look at it really historically, Smalltalk counts as a minor Greek play that was miles ahead of what most other cultures were doing, but nowhere near what Shakespeare was able to do.

If you look at software today, through the lens of the history of engineering, it’s certainly engineering of a sort—but it’s the kind of engineering that people without the concept of the arch did. Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.

---

I don’t spend time complaining about this stuff, because what happened in the last 20 years is quite normal, even though it was unfortunate. Once you have something that grows faster than education grows, you’re always going to get a pop culture. It’s well known that I tried to kill Smalltalk in the later ’70s...

---

SF If nothing else, Lisp was carefully defined in terms of Lisp.

AK Yes, that was the big revelation to me when I was in graduate school—when I finally understood that the half page of code on the bottom of page 13 of the Lisp 1.5 manual was Lisp in itself. These were “Maxwell’s Equations of Software!” This is the whole world of programming in a few lines that I can put my hand over.

I realized that anytime I want to know what I’m doing, I can just write down the kernel of this thing in a half page and it’s not going to lose any power. In fact, it’s going to gain power by being able to reenter itself much more readily than most systems done the other way can possibly do.

All of these ideas could be part of both software engineering and computer science, but I fear—as far as I can tell—that most undergraduate degrees in computer science these days are basically Java vocational training.

I’ve heard complaints from even mighty Stanford University with its illustrious faculty that basically the undergraduate computer science program is little more than Java certification.

---

This project that we started in 1995 was to make Squeak as an implementation vehicle for another end-user system for children. That was done quite well and is being used by many, many thousands of children around the world. The other way of looking at this is to realize that computers are made to be programmed by human beings. Let’s just roll our own. Let’s not complain about Java, or even about Smalltalk.

In fact, let’s not even worry about Java. Let’s not complain about Microsoft. Let’s not worry about them because we know how to program computers, too, and in fact we know how to do it in a meta-way. We can set up an alternative point of view, and we’re not the only ones who do this, as you’re well aware.

---

our basic language mechanism for both reading and hearing has a fast and a slow process. The fast process has basically a surface phrasal-size nature, and then there’s a slower one. This is why jokes require pauses; the joke is actually a jump from one context to another, and the slower guy, who is dealing with the real meanings, has to catch up to it.

There have been many, many studies of this. This argues that the surface form of a language, whatever it is, has to be adjustable in some form.SF As you probably know, recent research has looked at how different parts of the brain recognize and react to jokes. Physically, they are quite distinct.

AK Yes. All creativity is an extended form of a joke. Most creativity is a transition from one context into another where things are more surprising. There’s an element of surprise, and especially in science, there is often laughter that goes along with the “Aha.”

---

SF What do you wish you had done differently in the Smalltalk era?

AK I had the world’s greatest group, and I should have made the world’s two greatest groups. I didn’t realize there are benefits to having real implementers and real users, and there are benefits to starting from scratch every few months. I hired finishers because I’m a good starter and a poor finisher, but it took me a long time to realize that I was interfering with them by trying to improve things.

I believe that the only kind of science computing can be is like the science of bridge building. Somebody has to build the bridges and other people have to tear them down and make better theories, and you have to keep on building bridges.

Weather Toaster

Some good links on Qualitative Research and the Association of Internet Researchers from David Eddy Spider's old blog http://gseacademic.harvard.edu/~eddyspda/

[PDF] From "Novelty" to "Community: Exploring New Roles for Technology in a Law School Center" by David Eddy Spider
h2oproject.law.harvard.edu/is98.pdf

a.(o).i.r links
Look in particular under online resources.

a.(o).i.r book listing

• Markham, Annette N. 1998. Life Online: Researching Real Experience in Virtual Space. Walnut Creek: Altamira Press. ISBN: 0761990313.
• Jones, Steve, ed. 1999 (*). Doing Internet Research: Critical Issues and Methods for Examining the Net. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. ISBN: 0761915958.
• Hine, Christine. 2000. Virtual Ethnography. London: Sage. ISBN: 0761958967.
  • has the following paper online, from a 1998 conference presentation: IRISS '98: Virtual Ethnography
• Dochartaigh, Niall O. 2002. The Internet Research Handbook: A Practical Guide for Students and Researchers in the Social Sciences. London; Thousand Oaks; New Delhi: Sage. ISBN: 0761964401.

Activity Analysis and Development in a Nutshell

J. Gregory included a link to this in her syllabus. It's a "how-to" on using AT to analyze organizational structure.

The New York Times > Magazine > Lives: Young and Very Inventive

The New York Times > Magazine > Lives: Young and Very Inventive: Nice Profile:

"Young and Very Inventive
By ROBERT GENS as told to EDWARD McPHERSON

As far as I know, I'm the only high-school kid who works at the M.I.T. Media Lab. The graduate students there are about 26 or 27. I'm 17. My free time used to be spent dreaming about things I could eventually build. Now I can point my finger at what it would take to make an idea a reality.... "

InfoWorld: Macromedia and Nokia to bring Flash to phones

InfoWorld: Macromedia and Nokia to bring Flash to phones:

What's the most popular personal computer in the world?

Macromedia and Nokia announced an agreement to integrate Macromedia Flash technology into Nokia's Series 60 Platform for mobile devices, including smart phones.

(the cell phone)

Rotundus AB

Rotundus AB: Another idea Remo, Guy and I and I don't need to implement...



In order to move the pendulum is lifted in the direction of travel, the centre of mass gets displaced in front of contact point between the ball and the ground and the ball starts rolling.

Turning is accomplished by moving the pendulum to either side. The locomotion principle is clearly illustrated in an animation.