That said, I have great respect for you and maybe this is the first real sign of a change at Microsoft ….

Again, reading your comments since the early BYTE days and a pair of 5.25′s in a 286 gives this old man a long perspective on your gifts. And they most assuredly are that — Gifts to the readers from someone with a great instinct for the future in technology.

I look forward to seeing and hearing more of your creativity in the future. I do believe you will be a good influence on Microsoft’s environment and a push in positive directions.

May you continue to have fun in what you do and be successful. Enjoy and stay healthy!

Steve

I recently also joined the Microsoft employment ranks from I guess being in the general population of Adobe (maybe slightly more vocal in my local Adobe community) and recieved everything from “Sell-out” emails through to my blog being dropped from syndication – simply for fear that it will be pro-MS and anti-Adobe etc.

Such comment above holds true and I look forward to reading more of your work Jon as I agree, your compass does point to “what works”.

Congrats

and thank you for your work throughout all these years. Thank you for introducing web technologies to me through your Byte columns back in the old days of the Internet. I owe you one in particular, because your column was largely a motivation for me to experiment. It all sounded so futuristic back then, and now, here i am working as a web developer. I do not want to give any advice for i respect your opinion – almost – unconditionally. Good luck at MS.

Ive been an avid reader of Byte back in the late 80s early 90′s…. And for sure i had a lot of respect for your views as was the case when you moved to InfoWorld..

I dont doubt you will do great things to cross-pollinate within Microsoft, but please dont sell out. I know you are talking about software that works… i cannot agree more…

but lets hope people like you and Ray Ozzie can change MS to be less about proprietary platform lock-in.

Don’t forget Apple – OS X, Google – GMail, Mozilla – Firefox !! — remember to keep it real and don’t sell out!

S.

I am curious, which puzzler question did MS ask during your interview?

Best wishes and happy holidays to you and family.

Eric

I just realized my long-winded response to your questions didn’t get posted last week. That might be better for all us

Briefly, your point about “useful ones bubble up from a background of junk correlations” is one of the most important problems we have to solve at Swivel. 2 weeks ago we had only our friends and family using Swivel and very little data. Today we have 1400 data sets and 2300 registered users. So, now we can do a bunch of interesting tweaks to the rules in Swivel that help the interesting stuff come to the top.

Brian Mulloy
CEO & Cofounder
http://www.swivel.com

Right now Swivel is csv only. We have an internal prototype of an API that supports input and output with valid XML. Look for us to harden that API and release it in the first half of 2007.

Admittedly strange. The rationale was that the audio is part of a series that might be subscribed to independently of the blog.

You’ve GOT to be kidding.

Any chance of having the Swivel Data in one of the following forms:
1. Valid XML
2. Atom
3. RSS 1.x or 2.0
4. RDF/XML

If you can get 1,2, or 3. I can get you RDF/XML by way of automatic generation etc..

Bruce

Well you *would* say that. You work for Microsoft.

Joke…

Yes, there’s more there now. It would be interesting to hear more about the purpose and method of these elaborations. And also, since a month’s worth of data is not anything to base trends on, it’d be interesting to see, for some more robust data set:

- Some examples of useful correlation within and across data sets

- How people can make the useful ones bubble up from a background of junk correlations

We just happened to do a new deployment of Swivel early this morning. Not sure if you saw the page before or after that deployment. We had a bunch of stuff broken at launch, including our Swivel robot that generates graphs for us (I had a nasty bug in the crawler code I had written, yikes). If you go there now, do you see the same stuff you saw when you posted? At the moment, for your uploaded data Swivel has generated 1 primary trend graph, 8 scatter plots and 8 comparison trend graphs for each column. that’s about 150 or so graphs (plus each graph’s data table) for you and the other Swivelers to cruise.

Thanks for the post about Swivel.

Brian Mulloy
CEO & Cofounder
http://www.swivel.com

It’s not a huge deal, but there is some useful difference — in terms of a priori trust — between http://www.barclays.co.uk/, where co.uk is unmoderated, and http://www.barclays.bank.uk, where bank.uk is moderated by the relevant policy-making authority.

There are lots of options. http://yousendit.com and http://send6.com are a couple examples.

In other words, the UI ought to be a client for the restian interface. Hopefully, web2.0 platforms expose this in a systematic way.

A question though: can one extend this architecture so that the javascript UI can work offline, allowing ajax applications to be carried around. This would seem to need some caching and a local ‘replay’ web server which has a local copy of the data…

That was preventing me from getting information out of some web-based tools because I couldn’t access them via a normal web-spider (in Perl, my preferred development language).

(As an aside, if you are writing web-spiders in Perl and not using WWW::Mechanize, it’s like you’re programming with an abacus.)

After trying to imitate the actions (setting cookies, creating hidden fields) that javascript would have performed in Perl, I found this module:
http://search.cpan.org/~abeltje/Win32-IE-Mechanize-0.009/

Win32-IE-Mechanize supports the WWW::Mechanize API while driving an IE browser!!!

The inadvertent blocking of information flow that a dependency of javascript caused can (usually) be sidestepped by just driving a browser directly.

I haven’t tried this technique with AJAX-heavy sites yet. But, I think this is a solid path to automation.

I imagine there are equivalents for Win32::IE::Mechanize for other languages (and while there’s a Firefox/Mozilla equivalent I couldn’t get it to install) since (I think) this module is really just a very thin layer on top of a InternetExplorer COM object.

So, in this case MS did something right… Jon, I hope you can help them continue

Thank you for your time,
Daniel Fisher

From the first inception of the web, I always maintained that what it really needed was a few good librarians..

–Dorai

I second Jeremy Zawodny’s comment. It’s by luring folks of your stature that Microsoft succeeds.

–rj

Take the parallel of Tim Bray aligning with Sun – it seems to have improved both him and Sun. I hope the gorilla is equally mutual.

Congratulations and best of luck: I think this is a brilliant move for Microsoft and one that I hope will help you to pursue your terribly important work. I suspect it will.

I made an analgous move exactly one year ago and initially had many of the misgivings that you no doubt also had. I had only the ‘wait and see what happens before you judge this’ tact to fall back on, and was slapped by more than one former colleague with the accusation of selling out. In hindsight I traded a somewhat tenuous independence for a better-funded one. My current keepers are no more interested in unquestioning loyalty than any of my old clients were. The difference is – now my critiques have more teeth.

From the selfish point-of-view of their employer, an analyst is only useful when he says exactly what he thinks, and an evangelist is only credible when he says exactly what he believes. I am certain that you can only continue to do both.

Cheers,

Joe Beirne
New York

congrats on your move! Visiting Infoworld will be less pleasant

I don’t have anything new to add to the scores of people who’ve commented earlier — reading all the comments will tell us how much you’ve influenced people.

I hope that will continue to cover Java and Open Source.

Good Luck!

BR,
~A

Many years ago I was a Technology Evangelist at Microsoft. The job has changed but the need has not.
Microsoft is at its best when it is focused on adding value for customers (users and developers) instead of its partners or insane attempts to lock us in. Smart, articulate, capable people you are a huge part of that.

I know you will find Microsoft to be filled with passionate alpha-geeks like yourself. Give them voice. Connect to them to the outside.

I look forward to great things.

If I can be so bold as to ask for one favor, please get someone at MS to consider extending DRM to work with ADFS along with a continued conversation around entitlements where MS shows others how to do this right.

Best wishes

As an artist of the possible, and as a generous human being, you have inspired and instructed me every step of the way. I can’t wait to see what’s ahead, for you and for all of us. Godspeed!

I hope the change will keep you energized for some time to come, and I wish you the best of luck in your new environment.

http://vielmetti.typepad.com/superpatron/2006/12/congratulations.html

I’m probably not the most optimistic geek you will find when Microsoft is involved, but if some well needed change has any chance of being made, it will certainly have to made from the inside, you certainly have the credentials and track record to be a part of that change. (and that huge challenge)

Great success, good night and good luck, Mr Udell.

Just curious, but what will happen to all the articles posted at weblog.infoworld.com/udell?

I sure hope you can add some lower-key intelligence to Channel 10, which just seems to be a site for $ofties to feel good about how their products have been marketed (either by MS itself: Zune) or by some of the corporations they have a stranglehold on (HP: kitchen computer).

I have faith that you’ll be able to see the best mashups of all that .Net stuff with the more open standards and web services “for the rest of us”.

So, does this give you a fresh reason to come to PyCon (http://us.pycon.org) ?

I’m enthralled, excited, and intrigued. Great move! Congratulations.

It’s easy to see you making a terrific contribution to the way Microsoft is transforming itself this time around. (Beside providing full-content feeds now instead of having to point to the sheet, perhaps?)

All right, we need a Geek dinner on your first relaxed stay in Seattle/Redmond.

You’ve made my day.

Welcome to the party! As someone who goes back to before there was a Microsoft and who only joined up 2 years ago, after 20+ years on “the other side” I can tell you working here the best thing I’ve done in decades.

I used to work for Jeff and still do work in the same org focusing on MicroISVs, Compilers and producing audio/video/screen podcasts for C9 and On10. I look forward working with to continuing to shake things around here You might want to check out http://www.projectglidepath.net to see what kinds of non-traditional things we’re doing!

And thanks for noting the over-riding issue: we need to evolve faster than ever to make this planet workable for all living beings. Cyber-shmootz is our big lever.

– stan

ps — get to know balmer. he’s a fine lunatic.

I too am curious to know if you’ll be moving to Redmond or staying in Keene or something else entirely.

Haven’t forgotten the help you gave us with Conversant, both via your book and when we met at your house many years ago.

I hope this is a successful, fascinating, and rewarding change for you.

Seth

-John

And as Tristan says, what’s your new feed address?

This is a great move, especially if we get to see you around the Seattle area. It’s a great move for Microsoft. I think you can do more for them than Scoble ever did (which was quite a lot).

Best of luck on the new adventure. May both parties (and the rest of us) benefit from your time there. You have been one of the main reasons I hang on to my InfoWorld sub, and I look forward to picking up the feed at the new digs.

While I always thought that you might actually strike it out on your own, your new journey sounds like fun.

Microsoft has always had neat new stuff which the devil of windows only has managed to imprison in a echo chamber. Ray Ozzie’s groove comes to mind, Hailstorm comes to mind..and there are many others back in time. While the business case for windows imprisonment is easy to make, the smartest people always dont work at your company, and dont always use your platform. You have always kept that in mind, starting from the first time I read you in Byte, continuing through Practical Internet Groupware and Infoworld. I have a feeling you will be a highly successful ‘evangelist’, even and perhaps most importantly, within!

Will you still be staying in Keene?

Rahul

Welcome to Microsoft!! I am so thrilled about this. I have been following your column and podcast for years…from little Denmark…You are one of the main reasons i am able to almost keep up on technology although my role is now almost 100% business oriented!

I am so pleased by you joining, this is just what we need! I am sure you will really make an impact!!!

Ciao & Stay Cool
/Bo

This will be a lot of fun!

I have been reading your opinion columns and blogs for some time now. Quite frankly, while I wish you well, I am disappointed. I have been trying to get some feel around this “internet thing”, and have been trying to put together some guidelines. I have been reading your columns and blogs to try to determine what these should be. I don’t agree with everything you say, but take into account the insight you have due to the amount of time you’ve been dealing with nuts and bolts things. I’ve picked up a couple of clues here and there. But one of my main concerns is as follows:

All web pages should be compatible with any browser from Netscape Navigator 3.0 through IE 7, and run equally well from Windows 3.1 Mac OS 7.5 and Redhat Linux 4 through the latest Mac, Windows and Linux operating systems. Web pages should display the same on all browsers. It should never be a case where the web page is a method to force a user to upgrade web browser or operating system. A user should never be forced to fork over more cash, because some company has conned the web page developer to use a new tool, or upgraded a tool currently in use so that it breaks web pages that previously worked.

Now I understand that new features are being designed that can only be accessed with a new program. But quite frankly after the ability to download and play a video clip, to my mind there has been no new real functionality added to the internet, just fancier ways of doing this. The ability to post forms, and run Javascript has been there since release 3 of Netscape. The only other thing that has really been added are a bunch of bug fixes to fix problems bad people take advantage of. Again, that should not be an excuse to extort more money, but is a defect in the original problem that the supplier should take care of as a matter of course to provide a reliable product.

I will continue to read your columns, and blogs, but I’m afraid I will be able to obtain less useful information, because of a slant towards a particular product. I am hoping you will either you prove me wrong, or you have an influence at Microsoft that will truly make a difference, or both.

I second Jeremy’s comments, Jon. A broader audience will now hopefully benefit from your talent and perspective, and Microsoft will definitely be the better for it…Keep on keepin on…

I hope your future is bright.

Keep up the good work.

(From a minor founder of Byte (along with Carl Helmers and Dan Fylstra (Mr. Visicorp) back in, oh, what, ’73?), who’s always enjoyed your work.)

You’ll have a great time in the job and Microsoft will be better for it.

disclaimer : I’m a developer.

We develop for I.E and we use Fiddler as the user friendly proxy for capturing and replaying HTTP requests.
Mindreef is excellent but can get expensive(since it’s an annual subscription).

Also, Ethereal (or its new avatar WireShark) can be useful in doing the same job. And Wireshark is available on many platforms ONLY it is not userfriendly. If I have to use it, I will use it but if there are more user friendly alternatives, I’d use those.

I look forward to Fiddler for Firefox. One of the things that I don’t like about current Firefox plugins is that all the plugins are IN-PROCESS extensions. We need more and more of OUT-OF-PROCESS extensions (just like Brendan Eich’s posting http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roadmap/archives/2006/10/mozilla_2.html hinted at) like Fiddler. Whether I want those plugins OR not for all my apps(tabs), they are forced on me.

It will be nice if the plugins do work only when I ask them to.

I look forward to the next geek who will build the HTTP PROXY equivalent of Mark Russinovich’s excellent Regmon, FileMon tools (which are very efficient in monitoring registry and file acceses). In terms of architecture, a HTTP proxy would be similar. Will Microsoft ever release Filemon’s source ?

BR,
~A

In my view, the reference librarian can offer four avenues of help in the search process. The first, possessed by many but by no means a majority (IMNSHO), is “expanded cultural literacy.” This is a more exact understanding of what the seeker wants than what the seeker actually possesses. This leads to better search terms.

The second, rarer and hard to find given how libraries silo staff members, is actual subject expertise. If you’ve got a legal question, go to a law librarian. If you can find one available.

The third is searching expertise. Readers here no doubt can google on their own, but there are always “tricks of the trade” and an understanding that some search engines are better than others for a particular purpose.

The fourth is access to proprietary databases. Lots of good stuff … often the best stuff … simply isn’t in the spiderable public domain.

Think about it, your knowledge doesn’t match the developer/help file builder knowledge and your “tags” don’t tie either. That makes it hard.

Like anything else you have to start understanding the method to the madness before you can succeed quickly. That may be worth $100 per hour if you have to focus on marketing, sales or delivery tasks that have an equal or greater worth. Outsource where it makes sense is the rule of thumb.

Having said that, this stuff is not free, with the potential to do just about anything (with your stuff) with a single click. Oops, we goofed! Nah, that couldn’t happen to Google.

It’s so powerful that people can skip right over the answer to their question, if it’s not couched in familiar words. Marketing-speak, in particular, can be positively revolting. I’ve successfully reworded page titles and search suggestions to conform to user vocabulary, and seen significant increases in clicks in site search results. In another case, I convinced a site content creator to make a whole page oriented around a generic term that they didn’t use in their product line. As far as I can tell, people are finding it, reading it, and buying the product — a small chunk of purchases completely lost without that particular term.

Sorry to go on about it, but this is how it feels from the search admin side of things.

The mistakes most are making when looking at web office apps are trying to see them as complete replacements — Google Docs collaborates not only between people writing, but with office software on import/export. And wait until you have the psychedelic experience of seeing live editing from across the country happening while you are typing!

I don’t want Google to Google my spreadsheets – I want to keep them Personal.

Wonderful but impractical G-docs.

Perhaps someone could hack some scripting logic together
that obscurates document content on the server while
letting me login and see it through via their online interface. Possibly using a RAND function and formulae in the spreadsheet.

Yet this would be against Google’s own interest to data-mine the hosted universe – so I guess even if I could hack it they’d soon put a stop to it.

I think that after using Google for a while, not only do you develop search patterns and techniques, but you also train your brains to properly scan and filter out the good from the bad.

Many of my searches are about finding some help on a Linux issue, and it really helps when you can, at a glimpse of an eye, determine whether the result leads you to a forum, a mailing list, or a useful answer.

When you add to that the fact that enterprise document/content management vendors still don’t offer effective enterprise-capable collaboration solutions for geographically dispersed enterprises – and which large enterprises aren’t geographically dispersed? – it’s not hard to see what will happen, sooner than most people believe.

A couple of years ago I did something similar called Dowser (dowser.sf.net) that searched multiple engines at once, combined, deduped & ranked the results, and saved the contents of each hit plus how you found it.

The second is around searching strategies – and, I agree that there are a number of abstract stages in refining a search which would be useful learning points for any surfer. However, the first point of reference for anyone in trying to improve his/her search is to ask the question – what typ of search am I conducting? Am I looking for an item I know exists – in which case, do I have any data regarding that item (title, author, location, publisher etc.)?; Am I looking for an item which I feel may/must exist (but do not know for sure)?; Am I looking for an item which may not exist – I simply don’t have a clue?; Am I looking for information about a subject, rather than an item…? Each of these different types of search may require a different starting strategy and a different set of refinements.

Which makes me wonder whether initiatives to provide natural language querying will ever truly be successful and useful. These projects attempt to reverse engineer what you successful searchers are doing with your queries, but algorithms cannot divine what the user does not know — and it’s the user’s knowledge that best refines the queries.

Anyhow, interesting article.

Rich
BlogRodent

Hi Jon,
I recently got a search question from a former lab colleague, here it
is:

=============
Can you help me out and use your superior searching
skills to find a paper for me?? I know there is a paper out there,
published in late ’90s I think, where some guys set up thermal imagers
in an incubator and measured heat production in cells expressing UCP,
in a 96-well format. It was work done in a pharma company, don’t
remember which one. I cannot find this reference anywhere, and I need
to. I could be remembering parts of this wrong, but the general gist
is correct.
=============

background info: “UCP” is uncoupling protein, and the context is
diabetes/fat metabolism research. I found the paper in about 10
minutes after reading my email late one night, prompting him to ask me
how I did it. Note: I used Pubmed a bit, but found the answer with
Google.

Googled:
(UCP | uncoupling protein) thermal-imaging 96-well
(it’s good to use their boolean & phrase search features sometimes!)
First reference had this:
TSA was first explored by Mark Paulik, Ph.D. of GlaxoSmithKline as a
method to measure the effects of drug compounds targeting metabolic
disease.

So I searched Pubmed for Paulik [AU] and imaging
and found the reference my friend had in mind:
Development of infrared imaging to measure thermogenesis in cell
culture: thermogenic effects of uncoupling protein-2, troglitazone,
and beta-adrenoceptor agonists.

It’s the kind of thing that I, as a teacher, would like to see focused on a lot more in school. I don’t see nearly enough focus on search strategies or how to use boolean operators.

Before going to the search engine: what is the information I’m looking for? Is that REALLY what I’m looking for? If not, what else sounds like what I might like to find? This process takes only a few seconds, once you’re “in the zone,” but if you want to develop a consistent strategy, checklists are the way to go.

Once you get your first batch of results, click through the first three search result screens to see whether you are in the right ballpark,– SEO marketing actually can hamper good searching, because the people who pay for placement (one way or another) don’t always have what you’re looking for.

The analogy is to running through the formulae in your head and making sure you have at least two identities: one containing the place you are starting and the other containing the place you need to end up (the thing to be proved). then, to be safe, you throw in other identities that contain the two words…like tag clouding (brainstorming).

Then, make some quick decisions about which links to click. The search engines sell placement, but they can’t sell thought patterns for dedicated searchers. skepticism will get your results a lot faster.

The analogy is to play (in your head) with a few steps in, to see if there is a quick path to solving the proof, or whether there needs to be significant manipulation one way or the other. Sometimes, it’s easier to solve a proof backwards.

Finally, once you have a better idea of the universe, you can narrow down your search by using “hacks.” In one of your examples, you probably could have saved a lot of time by putting quotes around “Atlantic Monthly Panel” because “state of the union” (at least in the US) is MORE likely to pull up government stuff than it is a forum panel speech.

This might correlate to substituting known short cuts,–walking through a series of known proofs to see how they attack similar problems. Conversely, maybe what you find out is that you don’t have the right tools and you need to add something to the toolbox (e.g. another search engine).

Consumers pay lawyers much more to do exactly this sort of thing everyday, –$100 an hour is cheap if you have to have the information fast!

http://www.rochester.edu/news/show.php?id=1833

As a side, all this talk about searching through data and meta data to find what we want reminds me of the character called Laney from William Gibson’s trilogy set in San Francisco and Tokyo (Virtual Light, Idoru and All Tomorrow’s Parties) who could literally ‘feel’ his way through data (Anybody know what I’m talking about?!). Perhaps, as we are refining our search techniques, we are developing an intuition of sorts.

Organic Valley Coop (who’s chocolate soy milk is very, very tasty, IMHO) is working toward this kind of supply chain transparency. For example, for its line of soy milks, you can enter a code from the box and see the origin farm of those soy beans. The application could benefit from more work (a Google Map of the farm), but it’s a start.

Find My Farmer
http://www.organicvalley.coop/soy

For example, do we really expect everyone–including ourselves–to know all the ins and outs of the automobiles that we drive? Of course not. Most people just want to turn the key and have it work; same for computers. Cars and computers are tools, first and foremost.

It’s only a minority who take steps to learn how to maintain and repair their automobiles; why are we surprised that the same holds true for computers?

Just because the people reading these columns are computer-centric doesn’t mean the rest of the world is somehow wrong.

I don’t view this behavior as an outgrowth of fear on my part… it’s just a different motivation. Knowing everything there is to know is not my motivation. What drives me to learn is that I need/want to accomplish something.

Clearly Kristin’s motivation is more beautiful and noble. I wish I had it. However, I suspect that mine is more common.

I agree with Darius that there is probably a lot untapped there. And so many questions — why do we even try to sit down in a place where there are no legs to really get tired? Maybe we should be flying and perching in clouds of conversations and tags or something. Certainly “HTML on a prim” is far from ready yet, but that’s just why trying to clunkily take web pages and arrange them around like wallpaper on 4 walls seems a totally hilarious thing to do in SL. I imagine people will look back on this in 5 years and laugh.

SL is for intense and intimate relationships of varioust types which seem to be facilitated by representation as avatars. And it’s for being able to manipulate objects and builds in 3-D space. But it works better when you already have something in common you do together in RL, or something you do within SL itself. Trying to transplant fake, hypey business meetings where you talk about the brand and new technology into this setting merely plays up its phoniness and begs for more authenticity. Why was such a fake question about connectors even asked?

When I worked with a group of campaign volunteers in the 2004 elections, I noticed that the younger ones (20-30) were all very computer-literate. They used their PCs and apps quite competently, but ONLY as an appliance. They didn’t know (nor did they want to know) the gory details. Either things worked, or they begged for help. Our industry needs to design products more for the “normal” public, and less for the experts. Jon’s article discusses one example, but I think we need a much broader and deeper re-thinking about the way software and data are presented to the user.

I often think about the lack of knowledge that many people have about computers, and the teacher in me has this wish to show everyone how to be more comfortable with exploring the ways their computers work, and use their critical thinking abilities.

I understand this sort of veers off topic, and doesn’t really address the issue in the short term, but I had to say it.

The comments on your original article touched on some of these issues including integration, publicly accessible space, and even about hiding the technical details from the user, but none met all three conditions outlined above.

While it’s great in concept and it may come to pass some day as systems and information continue to drop in price, I don’t think there’s a large enough demand for this type of information because (like it or not) most people simply don’t give that much consideration to environmental concerns.

The analogy breaks down when you compare produce to FedEx packages. There is undeniable value in knowing where your package is as it relates to its time of arrival. Tracking packages for timeliness is paramount to the reason why people use FedEx, but most people don’t care if the package traveled from LA to Memphis to Tucson as long as it arrives on time. Sorry, but it’s true.

The environmental impact of a production/delivery process for a given product is far from the primary reason why the great majority of consumers do or don’t purchase a given product, especially food. Taste, appearance, safety and price trump environmental impact for the great majority of buyers. You can see this thinking in adcyion every day: many of the same people who claim to care about preserving American manufacturing jobs at all costs are the first ones in line when Walmart has a Black Friday sale on Korean and Malaysian TVs.

My point is simple: the system your suggesting makes sense for products and customers where environmental impact is the greatest concern, but that’s simply not the case for the great majority of products and customers, so it doesn’t make sense for most IT shops to consider this idea as something that will give them a competitive edge.

One last tangential example: http://www.caranddriver.com/dailyautoinsider/10871/doubts-cast-on-hybrid-efficiency.htm

Do you think a report like this will keep people from buying Priuses? Not likely — Prius buyers want to *feel* like their helping the environment and they want to be *perceived* as environmentally aware even if the truth is much more complicated.

http://webseitz.fluxent.com/wiki/EnergyAccounting

For the people who don’t use this, it seems to me that the logic chain breaks down this way:

1). Mostly, they are non-technical. The Web does a pretty good job of hiding technical information from such people, so they’ve learned to use the Web. And, for the most part, non-technical people don’t aspire to becoming technical;

2). E-mail attachments work and are the simplest mechanism for sending bulk information. It’s the first thing a naive client is likely to hit upon;

3). So these non-technical clients are using the time-tested rule of “Do the Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work”. There’s nothing really wrong with that;

4). They are also following standard exception processing rules. In other words, do what you think is right until you have a problem, then treat the problem as an exception. You don’t need to do a whole lot of pre-checking; handle it as a post-processing exception condition instead.

One of the things that make me think this? Most clients I deal with aren’t even aware of the size of their information package. They frequently don’t know how to get size information, and having gotten it, have no context into which to place this information (“Megabyte? Is that big?”).

Have you ever used the YouSendIt.com service for transferring files? It’s a free service with a 1GB limit (I think) and the download expires after 7 days. I think it is exactly the idea you are trying to convey with your sample application.

http://yousendit.com/

XACML has been designed to allow the creation of policies which take into account virtually every sort of information which is available at access decision time. We have seen XACML applied to a wide variety of access control problems without difficulty.

I do agree with his comments on market uptake. However there are organizations like the Jericho Forum who are committed to deperimeterization.

I also agree that when policies get too complex, people can no longer manage them.

If it’s 100 MB or less, I use email and my Tuffmail account, which allows 100 MB attachments. I used to be a don’t-send-files-via-email person, but now I’m a use-email-for-everything person!

http://www.sendthisfile.com/info/sendthisfile.jsp

in the past. Free, requires reg, no filesize limit but time window and other limits apply.

The only down side is that – as far as I know – there isn’t a broadcasting client for the Mac or Linux

Unless you also say and “are ay em” for RAM and “gee you eye” for GUI, you should admit to yourself you’re going to lose this pronounciation battle. It’s a win for the web that URL is being reduced to a single syllable with a leading vowel sound. Join the revolution, already.

ObTopical:

Would it be too much to hope for that the Content-Disposition header on a 30X redirection response be respected by a web browser with regard to the redirection target URL, such that it would be possible to have a click-to-download redirection service like:

http://clicktosave.com/http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/screenroom/dabble.flv

???

Perhaps this already works — haven’t yet had a chance to test.

It’s “a URL”, not “an URL”, since “U” is pronounced “you” — it has a consonant sound at the beginning.

And if you pronounce it “earl” instead of “you-are-ell”, that’s like nails-on-a-chalboard.

You are a person of few words, er, URLs, Gavri. Anyway, thanks for the reference, I was always vague on how a server can make a browser raise a file download dialog directly (as George discusses in comment #7).

If you upload to a server that does this, and if the MIME type works out according to the expectations of the sender and receiver, it’s all good.

But many/most servers to which people upload aren’t configured that way. Nor would that make sense, really, because I might wish to directly view a .MOV file that you would instead wish to download.

A more precise problem statement might be: Person A uploads a file to vanilla HTTP service H, transmits the URL to B, and wishes person B to be able to either launch or download the file, at B’s discretion. Neither person A nor person B is a geek. Service H is not necessarily under the control of A or B.

1) Permanence. Email is often used as a delivery method for the final version of reports to clients. Sending the file with the email confirms that the client has got the document, and means you don’t have to worry about uploading the file to a server, where you have to worry about access control and making sure the file remains there – if the recipient loses the file, they can always re-save the attatchment, whereas the URL is more likely to have expired.

2) Lack of integration. In an internal network, linking directly to the network filesystem is quite hard. Dragging and dropping a file will probably attach it, not just a link, and copying and pasting the path has to be done at both ends. Apparently Sharepoint can integrate a bit, but ugh, sharepoint.

Point taken. Terminology is at least half the battle.

Will you post the source for this?

Already did. Just View Source on dowloadHelper.html

why not sniff the user agent and only present the instructions that
apply to the browser that is visiting the page?

Perhaps I should. A bad reason is laziness. A possibly-defensible
reason is that enumerating the methods side-by-side may have some
reference value.

By the way, you are right that this is a problem. Another one is that
the MIME types of an URL are sometimes not what I prefer (media
file that starts playing in my browser that I actually wanted to
download). For this reason, I keep a temp.html file on my desktop
that I change the href of when I want to get a download link instead
of automatic playing.

Whoa.

So even someone who thoughtfully sends a link instead of an attachment
actually ends up creating a little work for me. I can’t imagine how
non-programmers deal with this. I write code all day.

Mostly, they don’t.

You’ll probably find that the more you think about what people need
from URL assistance, the closer you’ll get to gmail’s attachment
handling!

That’s a /really/ good point.

But your limited information about off-site attachments might keep
you from doing it exactly that way.

Precisely.

As Chaim implies above, I’m surprised that mail apps themselves are
not making this more of a priority.

Agreed. In that context you could assist both the sender and the
receiver in different-but-appropriate ways.

Seems like a lot of fuss and trouble when there’s
http://www.dropload.com out there…

Ah, thanks for that pointer. I was hoping to discover some solutions
like that. Are there any that one need not register to use?

I have a script on my server that sets the correct MIME-type and
starts the download immediately after you click the URL of this form:
http://mydomain.com/dl/name, where is either a name of the file in a
special directory on my server or a URL of the resource somewhere on
the net. I wrote this to be able to download files on my Clie UX50
PDA. But now I use it for sending files to other people.

“Correct MIME-type” is of course, as noted above, in the eye of the
beholder. This sounds like an excellent solution for those of us who
control our own servers. Have you shared it, or would you?

FYI: this doesn’t seem to work with IE7…
“line 28, object doesn’t support this property or method”

Crap. Sorry. Fixed now.

A better end-to-end experience: someone receives a short URL – not necessarily as tiny as tinyurl, perhaps based on filename, for instance: “http:///down?dabble1″. “dabble1″ is a tinyurl-like abbreviation generated when you uploaded the file (or social-bookmarked it.) Note that the lack of an extension makes it clear that this is not a file itself. Upon visiting this URL they’re given step 2 *immediately*, which should contain:
* a link to directly view it in a new window (or the same if you’re concerned about people getting confused by windows. My mother-in-law is baffled by multiple windows.)
* an iconic representation of what this file probably is (spreadsheet, web page, picture, etc) – based on analysis of the extension and more
* instructions to right-click and Save As in various browsers, with *their current browser highlighted*
* a link that they can copy & paste to send this to someone else [which is just the URL in the browser of course]
* an input box to the side which allows them to enter any URL and generate a page like this for that URL

You’ll probably find that the more you think about what people need from URL assistance, the closer you’ll get to gmail’s attachment handling! But your limited information about off-site attachments might keep you from doing it exactly that way.

As Chaim implies above, I’m surprised that mail apps themselves are not making this more of a priority. But when he talks about building a Thunderbird extension I think he may have missed the point of such a page

By the way–you are right that this is a problem. Another one is that the MIME types of an URL are sometimes not what I prefer (media file that starts playing in my browser that I actually wanted to download). For this reason, I keep a temp.html file on my desktop that I change the href of when I want to get a download link instead of automatic playing.

So even someone who thoughtfully sends a link instead of an attachment actually ends up creating a little work for me. I can’t imagine how non-programmers deal with this. I write code all day.

Better yet, has anyone done a Mac Automator workflow for moving a file to a server and creating a URL for it?

or something.

I do think the market “gets it” more now than it did in 1998 through 2002. Back then explaining fine grained control on data (or information, more accurately) was something foreign. But I feel it’s probably still an uphill battle. There’s an understanding in security community that “it’s the information, stupid” but it’ll still take two to five years until everyone “gets it”. Everyone is still depending on their perimeter for protection. As security officers start to collapse the perimeter around their data fine-grained controls will come into vogue.

The biggest problem is actually ensuring the rules/policies applied to the information/data are more flexible than what XACML can offer. Access control lists are all well and good, but the problem lies in the cooperation between companies, agencies, and government bodies. They don’t have the same view on how information should be protected. This leads to conflicting policies at a higher, more abstract level. We ended up creating a complete policy language to handle the vagaries associated with these interactions — the trust associations can become hideously complex.

I wish Rajiv Gupta luck. I, however, will stick to IT security research.

What bums me out about SL in many ways is how its core interaction technology is chat. I’m sorry, but slow laggy chat is no way to have a reasonable conversation with people you don’t know very well. No one talks in paragraphs in world, just fragments.

I was pleased once again to read a particular column of yours that
resonated with me (‘Just Give Me the Data’). I’m a bioinformatician (currently back in school), and I spent two years of my life recently wrestling with the flat file format of the PDB (http://www.rcsb.org/pdb).

I’m sorry to say that I never got round to taking advantage of the new XML format with which they republished the entire dataset about 3/4 of my way through the project. I’ve not looked for a few years, but your comments prompted me to go back. They have a few tools for format conversion, but it doesn’t seem like they’ve published tools simply for the extraction and recombination of data. There was a
paper published recently about PDB, describing its growth, but also pointing out the low use of the new formats (there’s several) described by the paper as a slow adoption by the general community.

You rightly state that the problem is a lack of ease, nobody is
going to download an XML file if they don’t even know how to handle
it. There must be so many professors, post-docs and graduate students sticking with the old format because they simply don’t know XML, just biochemistry and biophysics. What kind of difference would it make if a small program was published that allowed straight-forward extraction of the required chain segments without having to squint at the original file.

The result of my old project (http://monster.northwestern.edu) is a
web-interface that allows a 2D visualization of interactions between chains. I designed the applet to accept the results in an XML format of my own, which can also be downloaded, saved and used again in the future. At the time, I was self-congratulatory about ‘moving with the times’, but I now realize how restrictive the circumstances are, I myself did not publish any neat little scripts that helped the user to extract and manipulate subsets of the data.

The Systems Biology/Bioinformatics community has been expounding on
the problem for a while, because such science would jump forward in
leaps and bounds if all the little datasets could be shared and
intergrated with the ease that you envision. The central issue is the need to hammer out a universal format that encompasses every aspect of biology. What a daunting task as you can imagine, but I’m asking, is such a universal format needed? If any individual scientist could access and tie in data of their choice at ease, such as Avi did in his webcast, then, more than a universal format, we just need all the available data in XML/RSS, and an available collection of scripts, or even javascript bookmarklets, that empowers us.

I should add that another problem we have as a community is the
necessity to visualize data in its context. Whether this be the
comparison of evolutionary conserved sequences, the 3D structure of a biomolecule or the network of protein interactions, we are drawn, time and time again to use different programs for each context that in turn dictate the formats, such as the applet I designed.

A fantastic step, one that I wished I had time to invest in, would be to create visualization programs that are independent (if thats the right word) of the data constructs available, and is also ‘online’. In other words, to create visualization plugins for firefox that can interact with the data-handling adaptors (easy to write greasemonkey scripts perhaps) that in turn can handle any kind of personally or corporately designed XML format would be, well, as you say, the knowledge navigator.

Finally, the community needs an ease with which they can share, modify, and tout or blog better/updated scripts which can be installed with a click, a ‘bio-userscripts.org’.

I did some election day and pre-election day blogging on Vacuum, and managed to get a strong and steady set of hits before the election on my “Michigan sample ballots” page and results afterwards on a “Michigan election results” page. Along the way I blogged a full set of Ann Arbor area polling places with addresses.

I’m expecting that 2008 will have even more use of the web, both for basic factual information (how late is the polling place open?) and for opinion. I was happy that a guide I had posted to some relatively obscure races got regular hits for quite a few days before the local newspapers printed their ballot recommendations.

But if you could just talk to it, you prefer that.

Still, your point is well taken. A friend recently told me that he considers LinkedIn to be a productivity tool. Unlike me, he prefers to operate in the context of a network that is not publicly discoverable. The general-purpose Internet doesn’t (yet) afford that option. LinkedIn (and others) do. For some people, the benefits of multi-network membership outweigh the costs.

I do agree it would be better if a protocol (e.g., RSS for blogs) tied us together instead of a particular system. However, a system is easier to control and get started. Protocols are very amorphous.

Dan

Last week, Jon Udell wrote a column for InfoWorld where he bemoaned the lack of a Simple, single-purpose screen sharing tool. He talks about the fact that when you want to do nothing more than show off a piece of

The point of Jon’s article, which reflects my personal view, is that most non-technical people prefer a tool that focuses on doing one thing really well. In this case, “see my screen”.

They don’t want to be distracted by buttons and menus for features they rarely use, like chat, voip, whiteboarding, emoticons, polling, pen passing, app-picking, and on and on and on.

All these “features” just clutter up their conversation.

If they want to do a web demo, many prefer using a tool that only lets their customer “see what they’re talking about”, without the distraction (and confusion) of a gaggle of useless buttons.

Another service out there is the VNC-based Copilot at http://www.copilot.com, offering per-minute plans and $9.95 “day passes.”

http://kassblog.com/index.php?itemid=341

http://www.componentx.com/ScreenShare/

“what are you a bozo”

instead of

“car at your disposal”

OK, granted that didn’t need to be proofed so closely. Good thing the recipient of that message was my uncle.

It is a good product, but the training required is two-way. You train it and it trains you.

Similarly, readers of the data could make small screencasts which highlight their questions/problems with the interpretations of the author(s).

One purpose of visualizing data is to disambiguate the interpretations as much as possible… when this doesn’t succeed, perhaps another visual technique, screencasts, would be useful (along with access to the original data, of course, to allow alternative analytical techniques).

(I was also pleasantly surprised to see that you’re using a wordpress template that I designed a while back)

So here’s the deal. Show us your interpretation of the data. And then give us the tools to do it for ourselves.

I’m not arguing for or against the graphic. I’m arguing for a culture in which we can riff on data visualization, and trade those riffs, and arrive somewhere new.

Sometimes, a graphic makes data into fiction. Surely that’s worse than nothing?

http://reddit.com/info/odyx/comments

None are about Tufte, or Python, or data visualization techniques. All (so far) are reactions to Tufte’s interpretation of the data, and how that relates to (I’m presuming) people’s own experiences, or the experiences of their friends and loved ones.

When data visualization works properly, it becomes invisible — a non-issue. Attention focuses on the /story/ that the data are telling.

Yes. And the real point I’m making here isn’t about the pros and cons of this particular visualization technique, but about how we become aware of, and able to make effective use of, a broad spectrum of visualization techniques appropriate to a range of communication needs.

So the sparkline graph is designed to show off the gradients within a given row, rather than comparison across types. Different presentations enhance different views of the data, and it’s always a give and take.

On the web, his graph could be fixed by the mechanism you show: by letting the lines cross, but by picking the delta relative to which the sorting should be performed.

It’s a good point. The language of microexpressions is a kind of event-driven protocol. If you can detect an event and code it up, all that really should need to be sent is that code. Potentially a /very/ low-bandwidth solution. Gladwell’s language is evocative:

“you’ll not only flex your zygomatic but also tighten the orbicularis oculi, pars orbitalis”

Is it easier to detect these events reliably, though, or just brute-force the problem with a minimum framerate threshold? Great research question…

While cinematic video-conferencing allows every participant to share a conferencing experience so that there is less chance of some not noticing my twitched face, advanced versions should allow personalized experiences to reflect interest. In a negotiation meeting, micro-expressions of opponents will be more important that that of colleagues so the user should be able to prioritize participants by order of importance which comes in handy at the implementation level.

Video-conferencing software should also support multiple secure channel of communication to allow participants on the same side to communicate while the meeting is going on.

Imagine a more cinematic approach to video-conferencing [1]. When you are talking, everyone sees a close-up of you. As you are talking, I twitch my face a bit because I strongly disagreed with something you just said. My computer can detect that then signal to everyone’s computers. Each computer then inserts a cutaway to a picture or short clip showing my twitched face as it is done in countless conversation scenes in movies. Usually, someone else will react with another micro-expression which means everyone will see a few cutaways in sequence before the view switches back to your face. Note that all this doesn’t require high framerate.

[1] http://www.docuverse.com/blog/donpark/2004/06/15/hollywood-meets-video-conferencing

- Only web hosted and component shared
- Including sharing/borrowing component properties from trusted peer sources

Microsoft sells “applications”, but the Universal Canvas would do away with applications so there was no financial incentive for Microsoft to create such an interface. WWW is session and page base so there was no financial incentive for Microsoft to create development tools to support a Universal Canvas.

Hosted services need “applications” to keep familiar products for new subscribing customers, but providers shouldn’t need to keep to that model.

I still wonder, are hosted content/service providers even thinking about a shared Universal Canvas for an interface?

I’m not sure if XAML, WPF, or XBAP will provide such a interface since their application interfaces are still “compiled”.

Darius, you have just re-imagined Ted Nelson’s still-unrealized dream of Xanadu. Here’s my report on his appearance at the 1999 Open Source Conference:

http://udell.roninhouse.com/bytecols/1999-09-01.html

Here’s my blog post about an idea of mine that might help.

http://inglang.blogspot.com/2006/10/spreadsheet-based-blog.html

Would blogging be different/better if we (the blogging community) used something like Google Spreadsheets technology for all our conversations? Each paragraph would be a cell (that can be formatted by the same tools that a Google document would … mini cell-documents). We’d quote/reference by cells rather than site/page/article/comment (as controlled by others). We’d store/host/index our own cells. Gmail would just be a certain ordering of my generated content or polled content of cells. The interface would be something like merging Gmail and Google’s Docs & Spreadsheets, Reader, Calendar, Base, Video, and Page Creator into a single content creation/presentation metaphor, single interface presence, and online communication medium.

We could group cells into our own conversation, something like our own wiki. Reuse the parts we repeat or reference frequently by reference pointer (like a spreadsheet’s “=A2” formula) rather than copy/paste. Tags would be cell properties (easier to tag implicitly by cell proximity to each other). Copyrights/Commons would be cell properties. “Author” would be a cell property. Cell properties would be replicated as part of the reference pointer as well. Security and encryption would be at the cell level as well. A cell could contain more media that just text such as a video clip, sound recorder/player, or a code snippet as an executable function….

SqSquare is something of a graphical 2D version of the previous concept, since an internet aware programming IDE is built-in in every client.
http://sqsq.jp/SqSquare/7

Such a system as described in my prior comment could even be a replacement for email I’ve suspected … blogging to an individual.

I noticed that ns1.infoworldtestcenter.com was removed removed several weeks ago, but now it is back.

The IPJudo tool (tcp/ip diagnostics tool in beta) is finding all of these problems with the infoworld.com name servers.

I thought you might be interested in our design decision for or revamped blog :
http://www.folknology.com/A_new_comments_strategy.html

Where as you went the WordPress route (like DW) we chose to go the cocomment route (Haloscan didn’t give us the ownership transfer and resposibility). Cocomment doesn’t yet support this officially but we hacked it (I think cocomment thinking is compatible with the ownership view). Let me know if you or your participants would like the code. I am sure cocomments are ok on this. I am hoping the cocomment guys will actually make it easier by building it in.

regards
Al

The barefoot children of the shoemaker are searching for their shoes as we speak

Thanks, Jerry.

Anyway, thanks for doing this. Great idea!

You _do_ need one of the “system:…” tags described at http://blog.del.icio.us/blog/2005/06/casting_the_net.html to make del.icio.us produce enclosures…

The feed associated with http://del.icio.us/judell/system:media:audio+tolisten will have enclosures, http://del.icio.us/judell/tolisten will not.

I assume you have seen this as of course, but I got a bit confused by you mentioning that the screencast suggested one should _assign_ them. I only assigned the “tolisten” tag in the screencast, but you really need to use the system tags _while querying_ to filter if you want to have the enclosures. My phrase “the system tag converts the feed into a podcast” should probably have been more specific “this system tag filter converts”, or something similar…

Anyway, I made the accompanying text more explicit to avoid confusion – unfortunately editing text is still way more easy than editing video and sound (this screencast was my first and I’ve been struggling a lot), but that’s been one of your themes as well in your blog – I referred back to your own Webjay screencast from a while ago.

While that statement may be technically correct, Turnitin would never choose to use one-way hash. Why? Because Turnitin would no longer be able to email students’ complete essays to third parties. Yes, Turnitin does that illegal act, but they don’t want the public to know about it. I got the information below from the “Well-Known Secret about Turnitin.com” article linked above.

Despite what Turnitin representatives falsely claim, Turnitin does not simply make a “digital fingerprint” that is indistinguishable and unavailable to the public. To the extreme contrary, Turnitin profits immensely from providing students’ actual work directly to other human beings (without the student authors’ direct permission). In fact, the following statement appears in Turnitin’s user guide for professors:

“If the paper is from another instructor’s class, we cannot provide direct access to the paper. To view the paper, you must first request permission from the instructor in possession of the paper by clicking the permission request button 4. We will then auto-generate an e-mail detailing your request. If permission to view the paper is granted, a copy of the paper will be sent back to you via e-mail.” (Turnitin.com)

Now, “the instructor in possession of the paper” has absolutely no authority whatsoever to grant license for anyone else to duplicate, transmit, or read a student’s intellectual property.

You may be asking, “How does providing to someone a word-for-word copy of a student’s original paper benefit Turnitin.com monetarily?” Well, we’re glad you asked! If you were a responsible professor considering paying for Turnitin, you would not commit to the purchase unless you received a POSITIVE answer to the following question:

“If Turnitin flags one of my student’s papers as having been plagiarized from a student paper in your database, will I be able to read the original paper from which you claim that the student plagiarized? I need to see the original source myself if I am to confront the student with plagiarism charges, risking the student’s reputation, my job, and a lawsuit against the school district.”

If Turnitin staff were to rightfully and responsibly answer “No” to all such requests, thereby refusing access altogether to students’ original, word-for-word writing, countless professors would never pay for Turnitin’s uncorroborated results (or not renew existing contracts). After all, a professor can’t convict a student of plagiarism and tarnish the student’s life-long reputation based on hearsay. Turnitin’s revenue would plummet. So, the people at Turnitin apparently choose to roll the “legal dice” by disseminating students’ intellectual property to third parties, hoping that a lawsuit never arises. In the meantime, Turnitin generates at least $10,000,000 in revenue per year by violating the IP rights of the millions of students for whom Turnitin hypocrytically claims to “protect copyright.” This practice of blatant copyright infringement via third-party, public viewing may also violate FERPA regulations because a student’s personal writing is an integral part of his/her educational record.

I found your conversation about integrating voice with human business processes fascinating. The business process community is still siloed between human and computer processes – for example, BPEL isn’t designed to support human-to-human processes.

We built an ITIL incident management solution at Citigroup that aims to integrate humans. We have escalation paths defined in the solution, and when an incident occurs, the system automatically calls (via phone) the right person based on the nature of the incident, using if necessary alternate numbers or an on-call calendar and going up the management chain with time.

When you’re called, it reads you a brief overview and you have to ‘press one to accept the call’ so it knows you’re there, and you can also ‘press two to join the conference bridge’ which it automatically sets up. This avoids scrambling for bits of paper in the middle of the night! Then you can automatically store a log of everyone who was called and when they joined the call.

This is a ‘push’ solution, but you can also imagine a ‘pull’ or subscription -based scenario, where you can ask to be called if your RSS / Atom feed reaches a certain criteria. For example, ‘call me if a new feed item comes in, with the following word in the title’. Wouldn’t it be great if Google Reader, or an enterprise feed reader, could call you based on the results of a search? This would get embedded in many different processes.

So I see RSS /Atom as providing a bridge between business processes and voice.

Regards,

Chris

Before that incident, I was pleased and excited when TAL was prominently displayed in the podcast area inside of TiVo’s directory and took this addition to be an invitation that more open access was just around the corner. I must admit that I didn’t take the time to investigate until later that they’d converted to mp3 all together.

That single act caused me to listen to so many episodes. I almost salivated at the thought of listening to a bunch of TAL’s with my family on a summer road trip in the country. I was all a twitter with expectation that even if they didn’t provide a proper xml feed with enclosures, that this was only an ugly hack away. Then the mp3 streaming countermeasures started… Oh well.

I was pleased and surprised again when I saw TAL prominently displayed on iTunes this week. But I didn’t immediately get excited. I kept asking myself, “Is this a teaser episode?”. Time will tell. In the meantime, I’m subscribed and lovin’ it.

It is difficult being a content producer, and even harder to be an incumbent content distributor today. I appreciate this situation more than most media companies consider. “Asking nicely” was a wonder, silly and incredible all at the same time.

AK
Detroit, MI

The Well-Known Secret about Turnitin.com

If I want to see some idiot chug a twelve pack of beer in under two minutes on YouTube, I can. But I can also find some outstanding musicians who will never hit Top 40 radio. Maybe, however, I’ve been drinking too much long-tail Kool-Aid.

I’m drinking it too. But the currently-fashionable media “business model” creeps me out:

1) Buy the largest closed network you can
2) “Monetize” the “community”

There’s a world of talent out on the long tail, but we don’t — or anyway shouldn’t — need to form closed networks to surface it. Syndication and federation across the open and global internet are the ultimate enablers for individual talent. There’s no such thing as a YouTube community, there are only the same interest groups as always, some of members of which produce videos. The members of these groups affiliate with one another primarily, not with YouTube or Blip or wherever. Aggregators will always play a key role, because of what Tim O’Reilly calls the “mathematics of multi-tier connectivity.” But the aggregators don’t need to be a few monolithic dinosaurs any more. They could be lots of small, quick, intelligent mammals, and I claim they should be.

Hugh McGuire wrote:

You only need a small audience to make something worthwhile these days. Things might look different in the big media congloms, but the niches of interest will always be there: both the willing audience (market) and production (supply).

And so the question is exactly this: How to reorient the power of central media congloms to the new reality of a myriad of viable niches?

re: software … I can’t really comment about what’s going on in the larger world, but where I live it’s hard to throw a stone without hitting someone doing some sort of interesting, innovative and entrepreneurial software development/web/ITish/arty kind of project, many of them with “good of the universe” at heart. & seems to me that the availability of modular open source/free software tools means building stuff has never been easier. people like building stuff, so they will build. and the tools are enabling great interaction between more arty folk and the techies – much more than ever before … i expect more, not less innovation as a result.

I doubt if many of us will become dot-com millionaires … but that doesn’t seem to be stopping anyone.

and I wouldn’t look to Time Inc. as a model for what innovation will look like in the next few years!

What I expect, however, is that the ability for practically anyone to publish–and profit off their effort–will result in more than a few people who eschew mass pulp in favor of quality work. Not every photographer stops shooting art photos in favor of liquor advertising work. Not every doctor chooses plastic surgery over family practice.

If I want to see some idiot chug a twelve pack of beer in under two minutes on YouTube, I can. But I can also find some outstanding musicians who will never hit Top 40 radio. Yeah, the beer swilling moron might get more page views than the musician, but some people might be happy to live on a smaller piece of the pie.

Maybe, however, I’ve been drinking too much long-tail Kool-Aid.

IMHO, it’s not reasonable to require all private content publishers to be geeks nor is it reasonable to require them to utilize expensive and/or cumbersome DRM.

http://featuresblogs.chicagotribune.com/entertainment_tv/2006/01/this_american_l.html.

Having a working podcast switches the context from, “Hey these people are stealing our radio show,” to “This is great advertising for our cable show.”

Maybe they’ll slide a few promos into the podcasts.

It could be one answer. Consider the 3D quality of American Sign Language, for example, which plays out on a kind of a stage that exists in the space between the speakers. Things can be expressed on that stage that cannot be expressed in linear speech.

> Darius:
> If the mountain rights groups actually simulated the process of
> destruction, economic impact, all environments affected, alternatives,
> groups, individuals, and personalities involved and their unique
> interests, you might be more informed than by any other medium.

Absolutely. While it’s amusing to poke some fun at the reflexive use of familiar styles in a new medium for which they are inappropriate, the serious question here is: “Where are examples of new styles that really leverage the medium?”

Chatting with Bob Lipman of NIST I came across a relatively new model of the World Trade Center … technically impressive, and it certainly demonstrates the horsepower that’s available today. Certainly no “chart junk” here, and yet …

The keystone to my “Participatory Deliberation” is discourse … by which I mean rigorous exchange that values subjective view . I’ve quoted from many dozens of documents in my site, but I gave pride of place to Richard Hamming: “The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers.”

I don’t think we’re nearly at the point where 3D techniques are required; we’ve not nearly exhausted the techniques we have. The snag, I suggest, is that the aim of the game is click-counting and not problem solving. On top of that, disruptive technologies require disruptive modes of production and that doesn’t serve the powers that be.

My first experience of something like computer-mediated communications happened in the early 70s, and I first engaged in using technology for public education only a couple of years later. I can’t say there has been any great movement forward in that domain. My hope is that a dialectical approach such as my own will show how we can handle task-oriented communications (i.e. less smoke and mirrors, less clehvur sophistry). But it’s like selling penicillin to folk who think disease is caused by poisonous humours.

No tool can cause folk to make sense. Well, none ‘cept mine. heh

cheers

Murray says that interactive 3D teaches by explaining the “process” of the dynamics of an environment that changes over time. It’s hard to explain in just words, pictures, or movies how the intricacies of the interdependent actions and reactions work in complicated systems described by “systems theory”. These systems can be found in social interdependent dynamics as well as the ecologies of the physical world and as also in the interdependent dynamics of past discoveries and the changes in the world of knowledge within every discipline. It’s hard to rewind a movie and run it a gain with a few different choices made in the begining.

Note that each medium doesn’t exclude the prior art but usually incorporates it. One should also expect 3D to allow one to use text or 2D as easily as 3D or the efforts will seem feeble. Murray shows that each new medium in its genesis was a poorer copy of the prior art and took about 20 years of experimentation to get its own feet and techniques. (Novels can pan and zoom but movies can do it faster.)

I suppose the holodeck in Star Trek could have been just 2D. Somehow I think that would have made a very different story and very different lessons for the characters. Going the other way, why couldn’t the bridge and its controls for controlling the whole ship have just been a holodeck? Have “who you need”, “what they say”, and your own “controls” everywhere you go. No more “running to the bridge” by broken lifts. The 2D controls they used were just as “virtual” and subject to the same “bugs”.

Someday we will control whole companies by manipulating them within visual representations of them. ERP and accounting systems are just text & 2D representations of models of the company. But you must admit that they are rigid, easily outdated, and very poor shadows to try to represent the moment by moment dynamics of a modern company.

Today, “processes” change so fast and new process constantly created by large social groups, that text and 2D just can’t keep a person informed fast enough. That’s the motive behind the BIM (Building Intelligence Modeling) process. Blueprints just aren’t fast enough anymore to keep all parties informed of all the latest changes by all parties in the time it takes to build a skyscraper or any other large building project.

If the mountain rights groups actually simulated the process of destruction, economic impact, all environments affected, alternatives, groups, individuals, and personalities involved and their unique interests, you might be more informed than by any other medium. We’re talking “serious games” studied at the “Serious Games Summit”.

3D’s best use will be by simulations to, first, document processes, then become “practice-ware” to gain skills in the environments, and finally as “predictive-ware” when predictive mathematical models take on visual form, substance, and a life of their own that can more meaningfully interact with our own lives. Controlling and defining “processes” in complex, ever shifting, win-lose, interdependent environments and their related economies while absorbing and evaluating massive amounts of feedback, is what many of today’s youth are learning in MMORPGs.

The ever-changing Truth is “out there”.

In my experience with computers and the internet, new technologies and methods will find their own niche, if at all. If there’s a need for it someone will come up with the idea, and others will latch on. I suppose the best thing to do is find a need that wants filling, and fill it in the most efficient effective (and sometimes interesting) way.

It seems to me, the question that needs to be asked is “What need do 3D applications fill?” I certainly don’t think improved communication answers that question.

As a different take on your apparently unproductive meeting: how many unproductive/useless/mismanaged f2f meetings have you ever attended? There are indeed best practices for running classes and meetings, yet not everyone makes use of such “technologies.” A bad meeting is a bad meeting regardless of venue or platform.

Ah. Missed that. It makes sense, XMetal and xfy are natural allies.

“It’s no accident that such minimalist modes as e-mail, chat, blogs, and wikis capture so much of our online attention. The Web began as, and keeps proving to be, an experience that’s more about social interaction than passive entertainment.”

I watch SL closely, as I believe it is the most accessable platform we have right now to start thinking “Web3D.” I’m hoping as the people inside businesses get inside SL, they will realize “interactive” does not mean “pretty and passive” as it seems to on the 2D web. Current case in point, Intel’s Second Life promotion has lots of social media attached to it, but no way for “us” to participate. I comment specifically on it here: http://freshtakes.typepad.com/sl_communicators/

Not only will we be having to think of content as 360-degree, but we will have to stop thinking of the web as broadcast entertainment. Thanks for another great article.

Yes, I’ve taken care of that. The feed now includes pubDate and itunes:summary. Sorry for omitting those, but fixed now.

Regards,
Lars

Is there a chance you might add date (as seen by iTunes) in your podcast stream? This would help me in choosing and selecting tracks to listen to in my iPod. Keeping a large backlog of your interviews, they all have long titles starting with “A conversation with…” and sort alphabetically

Thanks for the great work!
/peter in Stockholm, Sweden

On your other point; I’ve never supported either trackback or pingback, and have always used a straightforward pair of Technorati vanity feeds (by link, by name) to keep track of what people are saying about what I write. I don’t have any measurements, but it doesn’t feel to me like the conversational flow has abated. Maybe I’m wrong, or maybe there’s something different in our audiences. Somebody should be doing some, you know, actual research with actual measurements.

That page, in some ways, isn’t that different than my RSS feed. Well, except that it’s far less popular. In fact, my “main index” page really doesn’t get many readers at all.

Oh, I was looking here:

http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/

instead of, say, here:

http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/007673.html

Never mind…

Are you using some kind of wacky browser extension that might be hiding bits of the DOM or something? This sounds very odd.

Come to think of it, in one sense mine are first-class and yours second-class. I thought about hiding the comment block until revealed with a click, as on your blog, but then for some reason decided to display it directly. Might decide to change that too, not sure. What was your rationale?

At least not directly. I’ll be curious to see how thoroughly the parallel comment blog will be indexed.

> Why not pull the data in on the server side?

I might decide to at some point. For now, I was curious to see what would happen if I were to Do The Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work.

That seems kind of strange. Why not pull the data in on the server side so that entities who inhabit the non-Javascript lands can benefit too?

My plan was to first work through the original batch that CastingWords did — I got about a dozen done and then bogged down — and then assess the level of interest in continuing.

I’d be interested to hear what folks think about the value of those transcripts.

What are the reasons for this? Comments seem to hit the sweet spot of low activation threshhold, whereas blogs these days seem more productized, in the sense that people seem to be more thoughtful and ‘authory’ about their posts. People used blogs as linkblogs before delicious came around; perhaps the act of linkblogging made the activation threshold seem lesser then. There were fewer blogs then that one wanted to read too; so perhaps we all had more time.

All of this seems to indicate to me that we havent still developed good tools to deal with reading lists; to filter stuff from them; to reduce the info-overload. And further we havent developed the tools that make cross blog interaction low-activation. Perhaps the notion of the blog, rather than a public feed is the main culprit here. In the old days, Radio alowed non-blog category feeds, but it wasnt clear how many of these were subscribed to.

Maybe these need to be revived as a collected notion of a persons output. Otherwise things go mostly one way into delicious and the blogs, and the coversation aspect is lost. This is not to say that one cant generate feeds from apps such as delicious; but rather that our notion of aggregation and feedreaders is primitive, and that we have got used to this sorry state of affairs. Otherwise how to explain the large popularity of bloglines for example, which allows one to do precisely nothing further to the collected clips..

I’m going to hit this topic with a few posts (including the last one on LaTeX) because it comes up everywhere one looks: should everything be broken down into semi-independent parts? In other words, does componentization make things better, or ju…

That’s a really interesting proposal. I’ve never been fully comfortable with either the MIME or ZIP/TAR approaches, because either requires some layer of intermediation that not everybody is guaranteed to have.

Thanks,
Sridhar Vembu

Maybe all that’s really missing is an “upload directory” HTML form element. It’s pretty clear (to me) what such a control would do — it would just encode the entire directory as a MIME message (the way a single file is encoded currently) and include it in the POST.

Another operation that is expedient in a different way is a WebDAV style upload, where the browser needs to add a control that says “upload everything in this directory (through a series of PUT and MAKECOL) to some web location”. And then conference material submission handles the upload somewhat separately from the rest of the form. The slight advantage here is that WebDAV is slightly more efficient (none of the MIME encoding overhead) and hopefully browsers would provide somewhat better UI than they currently do for file uploading (e.g., better progress).

Either way requires browser changes, which are hard to make happen. The file upload thing has been a real pain for a long time, though, it would be great to fix it.

html2ps:
http://user.it.uu.se/~jan/html2ps.html

and then change the postscript to PDF using Ghostscript’s ‘ps2pdf’

I’m relatively happy with the results of this transform.

Thank you for your time,
Daniel Fisher

Perhaps those dynamic languages which can create a new class while running the app have a good idea. It seems to me that naming classes so they are easy to find and not create conflicts is the largest barrier to such an implementation.

The whole idea of “documents” might have run its course.

Documents are too much like novels to me. Once you start reading one, you have to read to the end before you know what the beginning was really talking about and why it was important. That’s just not agile.

If I remember correctly, Mozilla does support zip and jar files through the jar: pseudo protocol. You can reference resources as jar:zipfile_uri!/filename and things should work. Directory navigation inside the jar might need a cvs trunk mozilla build.

I don’t think there is an equivalent in any of the other mainstream browsers though.

http://lxr.mozilla.org/mozilla/source/modules/libjar/nsIJARURI.idl

Everyone above 18 must have mandatory ID; you must carry it all the time, and show it to the police on their request.

Currently (about to change) IDs are without smart chips, in them you can find owners name, surname & picture, his fathers name, date of birth, address (you must change it every time you move), 13 digit unique personal number, number of id, and police station that produced it.

In Serbia there has been IDs since WW2, so I grew up considering it normal, and not having a slightest clue that there are countries that don’t have it. When I first found out about it couple of years ago, I wondered how they can manage without it? After doing some reading, I’ve found some of the reasons against id’s, but I’ve never heard of any misuses of it in my country; only thing that annoys me is that you have to change it every 10 years, or when you lose it, but I still find having IDs perfectly normal.

Here in the UK the Blair government is trying to push us almost from one extreme to the other. We currently have no national ID card or associated database. They want introduce an electronic ID card with multiple biometrics linked to a database containing a ton of data (50 types of info on each citizen). At least in continental Europe their ID cards are backed by strong privacy laws and data protection. This government is not strengthening privacy laws and in fact wants to tear down the data protection rules within government. So it means that any data you give to any arm of government for any purpose can theoretically be used by another for something completely different.

At the moment it isn’t a big deal amongst the public. However, when people find they have to go to an interrogation centre to renew their passport or change the address on their driving licence it’ll start hitting home….

It’s in the early stages of development so we’d really appreciate your feedback or suggestions. It’s open to anyone – you just have to join Wikispaces (free) and then make a request to join this space.

It’s in the early stages of development so we’d really appreciate your feedback or suggestions. It’s open to anyone – you just have to join Wikispaces (free) and then make a request to join this space.

I work from home too, and just the fact that I can take a walk at 3pm, or be there at 5pm, I meet the schoolkids etc.. (this is Harlem). I think you’re on to something

We’ve been developing a set of web-based peer tutoring activities, in which each student participates both as a learner and as a tutor. Students log in, pick a partner, and take turns creating and solving problems. (One activity focuses on spelling, another on spatial reasoning, one on U.S. geography, and one on coin-based math.)

This relies on an incentive structure designed to motivate a pair of students to appropriately challenge one another. We don’t have expert tutors participating, but we do have lots of peers, many of whom do pretty well at constructing good challenges for a partner.

Since the activities are all websites with open user registrations, we’ve had to severely restrict the type of interactions among users to ensure student safety. (There is no direct line of communication between users like an audio chat or shared whiteboard.) In a more controlled environment, perhaps these would be possible…

http://www.BEEweb.org has links to each of the activities described.

http://drexel-coas-elearning.blogspot.com/2006/04/update-on-games-and-vodcast-for-orgo.html

See also the Edu-FRAG Wiki linked from the right panel.

ken tompkins
richard stockton college of nj

http://elgg.net/leoncych/weblog/129413.html

And it’s not R rated for children as the Linden world is.

I’m not sure how you’d avoid the “paying someone to do your homework” in this scenario. It’d take some more thought.

I am a middle school teacher who has had the pleasure of working with Tim Fahlberg. He has helped me and my team acquire a number of classroom response remote systems. Tim has an incredible passion to help teachers to help kids. His knowledge of up-to-date technology and their application in a classroom is excellent and his willingness to help is outstanding. I strongly recommend anyone looking for help taking their classroom to the next level, techonology-wise, to contact him.

Ken Brager
Highlands Middle School
Kennewick, Washington

Decoupling, and therefore choice. I’ll probably transition off Radio one of these days. For me, now, it’s mostly just an engine for squirting text through a template and uploading the result. But I’d like to unbundle the features of a blog publishing system, because one may give me better namespace control and search, while another handles comments in a way more to my liking.

A service-oriented approach, in other words.

- Jon

Replace SSN with “credit card number” and this is exactly the way a lot of (the better) payment gateways work as part of a merchant’s payment process: you are on the merchant’s site right up until you want to pay, then you get dispatched to the payment gateway’s site, do the “exchange information” dance with them and they then send back to the merchant a pass or fail token and some kind of ident. They may well have contacted the merchant in the middle of the payment process to verify that is what an expected and correct payment, too. All the merchant ends up with is a unique (hopefully non-reputiable) ident and an answer from a trusted authority. They never need to know about your credit card information. This can all be merged pretty seamlessly into the merchant’s site flow, too (it doesn’t have to be “check out” or right at the end), so it still looks like a professional process.

Short version: yeah, this scheme should work. It’s used in other similar domains already.

Agreed. I addressed these points in a couple of follow-ups appended to the entry. In general I was trying to provoke discussion about translucency as a design principle. Of course when you try to work out the implications in any specific case, like this one, it becomes clear why we rarely apply that principle. It’s hard!

> Clearly such an application should be considered
> fair use of the content for testing purposes

On the copyright point, I agree with you. However it would be nice to arrive at an architecture that did not require the service to retain the students’ content. Partly because of how that will feel to the students, and partly because it’s a liability to the service. TurnItIn will hate to read the headline: “5 million student papers stolen from website”!

On the question of presumption of guilt, and the adversarial relationship that may or may not be created by use of the service, there’s an interesting discussion to be had. In one of my follow-ups, Liz Lawley from RIT and Daniel Freudberg from McClean High represent to different perspectives.

http://laughingmeme.org/archives/002203.html has written this WordPress hack
http://laughingmeme.org/code/wp-rss-aggregate.php.txt
you could modify and have it generate the appropriate posting slug from the data in your radio blog feed.

Or you could have a look at this plugin:
http://projects.radgeek.com/feedwordpress/

FWIW – I think the claims of copyright violation and proof of innocence is without merit. You’re submitting your work to the teacher to be judged on its merits in regards to the assignment and its originality so that you may claim rightful credit for the work. Clearly such an application should be considered fair use of the content for testing purposes and, ironically, also ensure your own copyright is protected against those who would plagurize your work in the future. If the testing company’s use of your original material goes beyond that then I’d say you could persue that action seperately.

BTW, we have no problem with you freeloading off the comments here.

In theory you wouldn’t even need to point people here, you could just post to the comments form directly.

One other solution to consider is : haloscan – http://www.haloscan.com/
They provide comments and trackback features you can add to any blog/journal/site whatever .

I used this some time ago on my OPML blog courtesy of Mr Winer (the blogs didn’t have comments then).

Check it out it may be a good candidate.

P.S> Ive been having my own comment spam isues recently at Folknology, real nightmare.

regards
Al

There’s probably a good case to be made that it is a “fair use” of a copyrighted work. (Pro: transformative, not published, no effect on original’s market. Con: uses entire original work.)

But until the case is made and tested in some court, it’s only hypothetical.

I am not a lawyer.