Miscellaneous

David Weinberger’s (author of Small Pieces Loosely Joined and co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto) recent book Everything is Miscellaneous (May, 2007) is about "how we’re pulling ourselves together now that we’ve blown ourselves to bits". Early reviews and related podcasts are on his blog. JD Lasica's Modest Review on Social Media quotes Weinberger:

From management structures to encyclopedias, to the courses of study we put our children through, to the way we decide what's worth believing, we have organized our ideas with principles designed for use in a world limited by the laws of physics.

Suppose that now, for the first time in history, we are able to arrange our concepts without the silent limitations of the physical. How might our ideas, organizations, and knowledge itself change?

Oobjects and Gadgets

The recently launched Oobjects already has some interesting lists, like the 10 Biggest Product Failures, such as the Apple Newton, a personal organizer that required a personal assistant to carry it around for you, based on people mistaking sophisticated engineering for sophisticated design. They also list 21 Futuristic Interfaces, such as the swimming goggles with a heads up display.

Oobjects describes itself as "... like Billboard Chart for gadgets". Of course, viewers are invited to vote their selections up or down.

Personalized Search, and Cuill

Geeking with Greg has an interesting series of posts summarizing recent research on online brands and branding (especially the importance of Google and Yahoo! brands). The blog tagline, Exploring the future of personalized information, indicates the focus of the articles. Linden says "[Search] Personalization changes what people see based on their past behavior and the past behavior of others".

He also points to Search Engine Roundtablereports from the recent SES 2007 (Search Engine Strategies conference).

The stealth search engine, Cuill, is reviewed in John Battelle's Searchblog; there's an overview at TechCrunch.

Journalism and the Burning Man

Dale Dougherty has an interesting piece on O'Reilly Radar on the difference between news coverage of the Burning Man, and Scott Beale's continuously updated blog coverage, including videos, comments and pingbacks, at Laughing Squid.

BTW, tomorrow is the 83rd annual burning of Zozobra in Santa Fe, so Laughing Squid is ready for it with videos and still images from prior years.

Updating Technorati Charts

Technorati now has automatically updating charts of recent blog posts containing specific words, such as "entrepreneur". The first chart shows results for all blogs, the second for blogs with a lot of authority, according to Technorati.

English posts that contain Entrepreneur per day for the last 30 days. (all blogs)


English posts that contain Entrepreneur per day for the last 30 days. (blogs with authority)

Get your own chart!

Firefox - Campus Edition

The folks at EduGeek Journal note the new Firefox Campus Edition, with Foxy Tunes, Zotero and Stumbleupon already installed. It is still free from Mozilla, "the public benefit organization dedicated to improving the internet experience for people everywhere".

Search Crystal

SearchCrystal is available now.

Thanks to Fred Wilson at A VC for a pointer to this new aggregating search engine.

AltLaw Launch

The Columbia Law School’s Program on Law and Technology, and the Silicon Flatirons Communications Program at the University of Colorado Law School just launched AltLaw, a free full text of the U.S. Supreme and Circuit Appeals Courts.

The Program on Law and Technology at Columbia Law School was founded to publicize research on the legal problems created by technological innovation, and to design and disseminate technologies that might serve the public’s interest in law and legal change.

The Silicon Flatirons Telecommunications Program brings to campus individuals from legal, technical, regulatory and business backgrounds to discuss issues facing the telecommunications community.

Thanks to BoingBoing for the pointer to this new site.

IBM on SL Potential

According to Reuters,

Computer giant IBM now wants you to walk into three-dimensional Web worlds to browse virtual libraries. Starting tomorrow, IBM sales representatives in Singapore, Malaysia and Australia will staff the company's virtual Business Center in Second Life. "... we're doing this is because we do feel the beginning of a major transformation on how people are going to interact on the Web -- going from a flat to an immersive experience," said Maggie Blayney, director of Global Web Strategy & Innovation for IBM.

Thanks to Jason Hull of Open Source Connections for pointer to this.

Cold Hearted Web 2.0?

William Davies writes in the Cold, Cold Heart of Web 2.0:

The same technological zeal and business acumen that once was applied to improving the way we buy a book or pay our car tax is now being applied to the way we engage in social and cultural activities with others.
In short, efficiency gains are no longer being sought only in economic realms such as retail or public services, but are now being pursued in parts of our everyday lives where previously they hadn't even been imagined. Web 2.0 promises to offer us ways of improving the processes by which we find new music, new friends, or new civic causes. The hassle of undesirable content or people is easier to cut out. We have become consumers of our own social and cultural lives.

Thanks to Joshua Porter of Bokardo for pointing to this, and related pieces: Gong Szeto on the subprime meltdown and Nicholas Carr on the Automation of Social Life.

Red Herring Redux

Josh Catone at Read/Write Web reviews the up and down history of Red Herring magazine as their website relaunched this week. He especially notes their new social networking elements.

Red Herring might want to note the O'Reilly Rader review of HarperCollins new initiative to make 14 new books available for download to the iPhone. A quick look at the thousands of posts in the Lulu Community Forum might also be informative.

The HP marketing blog recently changed its name to Digital Mindset. The long running joke Mintz mentions, that HP would have marketed sushi as "cold dead fish", no doubt came to HP by way of Compaq, nee Digital Equipment Corporation.

Fall Conferences, 2007

Fairfax County, VA, is sponsoring the inaugural Conference on the Creative Economy to be held October 24 and 25. Speakers include Richard Florida, Thomas Friedman, Frank Sesno, David DeLong, Anne Fisher, and Alvin Toffler. Registration is now open.

The next SEBIO Investor Forum will take place November 7 and 8 in North Carolina. Winners of the year-long SE Bio/Plan competition will be selected during the event, and will awarded unrestricted, non-dilutive venture funds to launch the enterprise and implement their business plan.

The 17th annual Pegasus Conference will be held in Seattle, November 5 - 7. This year's theme is Amplifying Our Impact: Strategies for Unleashing the Power of Relationship. Speakers include Peter Senge, Debra Myerson, Van Jones, Peter Weertman, and C. Otto Scharmer.

LA is host to the Internet Telephony Conference and Expo conference September 10 - 12. Billed as The World's Ultimate IP Communications Conference!, an event blog and speakers list are available.

The next Trends in Nanotechnology conference will be held September 3 -7 in Spain. Speakers include several researchers from American universities.

The Third Annual Podcast and New Media Expo will be held in California, September 28 - 30.

The next Virtual Worlds Conference and Expo will be held Oct 10 and 11 in San Jose. Speakers include Edward Castronova, Beth Coleman and Susan Wu.

One can still request an invitation to the Fourth Annual Web 2.0 Summit, Discovering the Web's Edge, to be held in San Francisco October 17 - 19. Speakers include John Battelle, Steve Ballmer and Tim O'Reilly.

Finally, the engineers of the IEEE have scheduled their 11th Annual International Conference on Computer Vision for Oct 14 through 20 in Rio de Janeiro.

SL Financial Messes

Financial issues have been plaguing the Second Life economy recently, according to Technology Review, and TechDirt.

Perhaps the founders of these financial institutions in SL could have used some real-life corporate guidelines for virtual worlds, as discussed recently on Terra Nova. They are not all about etiquette. Cornell University's Robert Bloomfield and other bloggers at Terra Nova have pointed to the unregulated nature of financial institutions of Second Life.

While we are looking at financial messes, here's the mortgage lender Implode-O-Meter, and the hedge fund Implode-O-Meter. The taglines are great: Tracking the housing finance breakdown: a saga of corruption, stupidity, and government complicity, and Hubris, extreme leverage, and other people's money. Thanks to Paul Kedrosky for pointers.

Another Inconvenient Truth

The following online discussion and debate is an example of the power of the web to bring both wide public participation and deep expertise to bear on the detailed mathematics involved in research and simulation, the public policy debates that rest on that work, and collaborative contributions by widely dispersed individuals.

According to Wikipedia, Stephen McIntyre found an error in the surface temperature record kept by the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS). GISS has acknowledged the error and incorporated a correction in their data set. The error affects the surface temperature record from 2000 through 2007. The US Annual Mean Temperature Chart from GISS, last modified on 2007-08-07, is below.



McIntyre is the primary author at the blog, CimateAudit, which is said to be under a denial of service attack at this writing. His most recent comments, as a guest blogger, are available here.

Thanks to Daily Tech for a pointer to this online discussion, and to Anthony Watt's Watt's Up with That? blog for a historical summary and annual charts from the revised data. The mission of Watt's newest online endeavor, SurfaceStations, is the creation of a publicly available photographic database of weather stations and weather station metadata through collaboration.

More from Gartner

These new-era brokers use the Web as a transformational — rather than a supplemental — channel and leverage Web 2.0 functionality, including new programming techniques, blogs and social communities. Traditional brokerages use the Internet simply as a different channel through which to provide the same content and services that they provide through branches, telephone and regular mail.
Snippet from Gartner press release. Additional information from “Early Efforts at Web 2.0 Brokerage Will Challenge Existing Providers.”

Gartner's Financial Services Technology Summit 2007 will be from August 27-29 in New York City. Hon. Michael Oxley, former Congressman who is now vice-chairman of the NASDAQ, will be a keynote speaker. In mid-September, Gartner will present the new CIO Summit in Barcelona.

Chaos in East Germany

John Borland of Wired will be reporting live from the Chaos Communications Camp, taking place this week on a former Soviet airfield in East Germany. The Chaos Computer Club, one of the oldest and most well-known hacker organizations in the world, sponsors this event once every four years.

Spook Country and Cyberspace

According to a c|net news interview with author William Gibson, who coined the term "cyberspace", about his new book, Spook Country:

The thing that has affected me most directly during Pattern Recognition, and subsequently, is the really strange new sense I have of the Google-ability of the text. It's as though there is a sort of invisible hyperlink theoretical text that extends out of the narrative of my novel in every direction.
And on his recent reading in Second Life: What I find most interesting about Second Life is that I've noticed now, very occasionally, I'll see on the street someone who looks as though they have escaped from Second Life. There are people who look all too much like Second Life avatars and I don't know if they were there before or whether I just hadn't notice them.

On being asked how well his earlier novels, such as Neuromancer (1984) have stood the test of time, Gibson noted that he had completely missed mobile phones, and that the Soviet Union was another whopping anachronism looming in the background of the book.

OneWebDay 2007

Last August we noted the first OneWebDay on September 22. The OWD Wiki is available now.



This year, there is a Google map of One Web Day events world-wide. Email Dan (at) onewebday.org if you know of a missing event location.

BarCamps Continue

The 2007 BarCamp returns to Palo Alto in mid-August, as a block party among SocialText, Edgeio, IDEO, and iMeem. Additonal information on NetSquared

BarCamp is an international network of unconferences — open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants — focusing on early-stage web applications, and related open source technologies and social protocols. Snippets from Wikipedia.

BarCamp rules are admirably clear:

• When you come, be prepared to share with barcampers.

• When you leave, be prepared to share it with the world.

• Give a demo, a session, or help with one, or otherwise volunteer or contribute in some way to support the event.

If you want to organize a new BarCamp, Clever, Clever Girl Crystal Williams has updated her Ten Steps (now available in German and French).

Virginia's Young CEOs

Virginia Business Magazine has a great new article on young, web-savvy CEOs in Virginia.

CEOs profiled include Joel Erb, interviewed by BGN last May. In 2001, cuts in NYC advertising budgets affected about 80 percent of his business, Inet Network and forced him to rethink college. "We went from a staff of 12 in the beginning of 2001 to a staff of two, and I quickly realized I have to do something about this," he recalls.

Erb immediately enrolled at the University of Richmond. He calls his degree a $160,000 "insurance policy." It's helping him grow his business smartly, he says, rather than just aggressively. "I don't think I need college to make my business run," adds Erb, "but I need college to refine the skills I had to make it run smoothly." Snippets from Virginia Business Magazine.