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Gosh, I've been using Flickr for ever, but I still find it frustrating to go through my contact's photos. I have searched for all sorts of tools to make it easier but none of them satisfy me. I have seen bits a pieces of what I want from different apps and hacks, but none have them all.
Any suggestions? Anyone want to build one with me (I can't code to save my life)?
I've heard a lot about Matt Web through those closest to him, but never really met him.
Matt is half of an interesting and insane design duo, Schulze & Webb (I have met Schulze, BTW). It's safe to say that Schulze & Webb are racing forth, defining what happens when you mix design and Web and bits and atoms (and mobile).*
At the end of last year, Matt wrote down some notes on essays he'd wish he'd have written, but didn't. The notes are a loosely connected series of topics that joggled more than a few conceptual pinballs in my head.
Surface binding
One topic Matt touches on is 'surfaces', basically, recognizable bits of structure (data) on the Web. This is really about micro-formats.
But, and this pleases the bio-geek in me, he compares Web surfaces to protein surfaces and browsers as recognizing these surfaces and making sense of the surface structure.
If I understand it, there are patterns in the categories of structures in Web pages. Matt seek the range of these types of structures to be finite and stable, hence such a classification of types to recognize is possible.
Hm, this may be a solution to extracting meaning (tying to another thread of though of mine). I suppose this begs for some taxonomical survey of Web structures, if there isn't one already.
Refactoring code
It was a blast from the past for me when Matt stated his wish that code not be refactored, but added to. In the late 90s, I was at an amazing talk by Marvin Minsky to us biomedical post-docs. Minsky also said that we should not rewrite code, but patch it - there was value in the old stuff.
Matt likes to use biology or chemistry example, but doesn't here. So I offer: Genomes are not necessarily refactored by evolution, but usually written over. And a lot of variability in the genome is derived from cutting and pasting of new and old code, rearrangements, duplication, and divergence of old code, and repurposing of old code (and don't get me going about 'junk DNA').
Bringing about change
Matt has a few great points on change and ultra-stability. But one thought that is radically funny is devilishly deviant: drive badly to accelerate the adoption of self-driving cars.
He takes it further in relation to mind enhancing drugs.
For example, 'erectile dysfunction' was hyped and marketed as a problem, so that pharma could create and sell the performance enhancing drug, Viagra. Therefore, Matt asks, we could start pointing out a problem with mental abstraction as a risk. Then, after papers and studies and articles come out about 'the problem' a market would arise, demanding solutions to the 'abstraction problem'. Then pharma could be provided with the material to persuade regulatory bodies that pharma should and could come up with the solution to the problem, for the benefit of business and society.
Heh, that's be something cool to try (reminds me of the Frindle). Kinda like a Saffo Mind-bomb for the future.
Path through services
Fred Stutzman who writes on social networks keeps pointing out the need for services to answer the 'What's Next?' after adding all your peeps to the network. On a similar note, Matt mentions the never-ending game quality Flickr has (indeed, Flickr was first called the 'Never-Ending Game'). The game aspect keep leading the users back, 'auto-catalyzing' engaging behavior.
In the end, Matt's insight is to keep the path the user takes through the services to never end (and designed to bring in others, to grow).
I think that this path is not always the utility (feature of service) path, nor the best path, though I have no examples to base this on. Also, with the mobile lifestyle in mind, how can that path have interruptions and long gaps?
Product evolution
his very last topic is about evolving a product locally. Matt devises a vending machine that optimizes the product flavor based on popularity.
For me, it touches a bit on what randomness can bring a product. Since most products are about consistency, could a machine be made to randomly dispense a product to surprise the buyer? Kinda like Bertie Bott's Beans. Indeed, there is a drink that sort of does this.
What's with the biology?
Until I read this big article by Matt, I had not really read any of his ramblings (though I have seen him speak and read some of his more formal writing). The biggest surprise was the number of hard-core biology (and chemistry) examples. It could just be my bias to see these topics stand out, but I think I need to ask some folks what the story is here.
For example, one of his notes completely surprised me with the items places in one sentence, ranging from metabolics, to tectonics, to the Austro-Hungarian Empire (need to follow up in this, too).
I think he's just a well-read curious guy, who revels in mixing disciplines. For sure, this guy is as scattered in his interests as I am. And tis explains all the interesting things he and his gang spout off. I suppose I do need to introduce myself to him, if only for his bio references, but also because we have a lot of overlap in the people we interact with (though his are much tighter in time and place than mine).
As for you, go read him. He's a trip.
*Indeed, the crowd Matt hangs with, which I mostly follow second-hand via @blackbeltjones and @anti-mega, are all brilliant and creative.
What got me thinking all over again about the Semantic Web and how to find, navigate, recombine, and contribute to the flow of knowledge was a brief series of meetings with the folks at BioMedCentral. Of course, it helps that I am also a bio-geek.
BMC Bioinformatics had a special supplement on semantic e-science in biomedicine. The articles were very interesting, especially since seeing a problem solved in another discipline gives many pointers as to how to solve similar problems in your own discipline.
If you read the quote below, about infoglut, complexity, social networks, and information sharing, once sees similar activities in the social and living Web we all use.
But so much of the BMC Bioinformatics supplement is about librarian-like structuring of data. What's more, there is an element of structures that authors need to understand and adhere to to make their publications and data more machine understandable.
Yet, what is the benefit to the author? Currently, scientific publications establish primacy, prestige, and are a tool to get grants. By going through the extra effort of adding semantics to their data, what then does the individual author gain?
The rise of tagging and folksonomies were not only about helping others, but arose out of tools that made things easier for the user. Can we change the mentality of the scientist to understand the other benefits of adding semantic info to their data and publications, benefits that are different from traditional science publishing?
How may we do this?
Link: BioMed Central | Full text | Introduction to semantic e-Science in biomedicine:
Advances in biotechnology and computing technology have made the information growth in biomedicine phenomenal. With the exponential growth in complexity and scope of modern biomedical research, it is becoming more and more urgent to support wide-scale and ad-hoc collaboration and exchanging ideas, information and knowledge across organizational, governance, socio-cultural, and disciplinary boundaries. Researchers working on one aspect of analysis may need to look for and explore results from other institutions, from other subfields within his or her discipline, or even from completely different biomedical disciplines.
Fred has written a ton of great articles on the nature of social networks, and what works and doesn't.
This article (link below) gives me pause to my thinking that the trend is towards a 'me and mine' ring-fenced social network. But, at the same time, does a good job of showing that Social Relevance is something a mobile can do quite well.
Read this guy to understand more about different types of social networks and how the type of network affects its longevity and use.
Link: Unit Structures: Social Network Transitions:
I'm almost certain that the experience will be mobile based, incorporating geolocational data and personal beacons. We'll still want a rich social experience, but this experience will be secondary to the core situationally relevant need answered by the site (be it positional data or otherwise).
Doc Searls has a really good article on the state of the Web (from last fall).* He talks about the 'static' Web and the 'living' Web.
The static Web is about sites and content. The living Web is about time and people.
What really sums it up for me is the comment at the end of what his son, Allen, expects out of a 'World Live Web' (below).
Link: Linux for Suits - The World Live Web:
His original vision of the World Live Web was a literal one: a Web where anybody could contact anybody else and ask or answer a question in real time. When he first encountered the Web, as a researcher, he saw it as something fundamentally deficient at supporting the most human forms of interaction: the kind where one person increased the knowledge of another directly.
*In case you're wondering, I found a pile of notes I never wrote about. Hence some references to some really old articles in the next few posts.
"Emerging sub-culture"?
My ass.
I've been chowing down on burritos for a very long time, along with many others.
And in my day, it was hard to come by in Boston. I remember when Anna's Taqueria opened, just before we moved out of town. It was close to work and I'd sometimes pick a set up for the family on the way home. Back then, my boy would share with us. Now he can eat more than one Super.
Every time I'm out in San Francisco, I make sure to pick up a burrito. I have my regular places, but I like the random one I might run across. Of course, I also head to the Mission.
When I was in grad school, out in Amherst, there was a tiny burrito place in Northampton called La Veracruzana. The owner was a hard-working bugger, from El Salvador, I think. Dang, my wife was there every day (I think I would never have married her if she didn't like rice and beans). In short time, La Veracruzana crossed the street to a bigger and brighter place. Eh, the food was still great, but it lost some of that scrappy, desperate feel.
Boston.com tested a sampling of burritos from around town. There were a few names new to me. Looks like they preferred Anna's. Now, why they didn't get a burrito from Forest Cafe in Cambridge, beats me.
Link: Burrito panelists judge local chains' burritos - Boston.com:
There is an emerging subculture dedicated to the unique and varied delights of the burrito, that most egalitarian of foods, which provides your protein group, your tortilla group, and your salsa group, usually for less than six bucks.
Stefan's comment to my post on Facebook ("Facebook is a persistent Julie McCoy") got me thinking:
I regularly explain to people about how users have different personas for different services. Indeed, the way Stefan lists the services (see below), I'd even extend that to say that people have different personas for different social-object-centered services.
That then makes me think that maybe services should focus on a single social-object or maybe compartamentalize the activities around the social-objects they offer.
This then leads me to extend Stefan's comment to say that Facebook is mixing too many disparate social-objects into one network, losing the focus and definition of that social network, the social-object that defines the network and how people portray themselves (personas).
Link: Lifeblog: Facebook is a persistent Julie McCoy:
Comment by: Stefan Constantinescu
I'm sure you've heard the founder of Jaiku give his speech on social objects. With that in context, back "in the day" when Facebook was closed and for college kids only I wold spend hours upon hours upon hours on it. College was the social object. The parties, the clubs, the get togethers, those were the days.
Facebook becoming a platform = let's try and let developers create their own social objects! That is when it turned to shit because then Facebook lost all meaning.
Flickr = photos, YouTube = video, LinkedIn = professional network, Facebook = college? Not anymore.
We're rapidly approaching an oral culture. The fluidity of the Web seems to have many aspects of an oral culture in terms of how we can interact with so much of it in a non-literate manner - think videos, audio, images.
This is not necessarily a bad thing. But oral cultures had methods for maintaining what was transmitted orally. For us, everything is going digital. How will we preserve our digital memories?
The Long Now Foundation has been leading a lot of discussions around how to preserve digital records. They have countless stories of how, just in the past few decades, we have been losing data and access to information stored in digital format.
For example, they mention how on the USS Nimitz, opening older files in newer software showed slight differences in annotation and the like. Not a good idea on a nuclear powered war vessel.
In the same article, they bring up a great favorite of mine:
In 1986, for example, the British Broadcasting Corp. compiled a modern, interactive version of William the Conqueror's Domesday Book, a survey of life in medieval England. More than a million people submitted photographs, written descriptions and video clips for this new 'book.' It was stored on laser discs - considered indestructible at the time - so future generations of students and scholars could learn about life in the 20th century.
But 15 years later, British officials found the information on the discs was practically inaccessible - not because the discs were corrupted, but because they were no longer compatible with modern computer systems. By contrast, the original Domesday Book, written on parchment in 1086, is still in readable condition in England's National Archives in Kew. (The multimedia version was ultimately salvaged.)
The thing is, digital data requires software, in addition to hardware. And software is very difficult to recover to to its format, how it is compiled (software to make software), and how fast it changes relative to hardware changes.
In another article, they point out that the Society of American Archivists were going to delete their listserv data. Whoah. If the archivists are not keeping stuff, who will?
The Long Now Foundation asks:
Can anything last forever? The Long Now Foundation is micro-etching its 15,000-page Rosetta Project, an archive of data on human languages, onto a 3-inch metal disk it hopes will last at least 10,000 years. But we still may not have improved on 4,000-year-old technology. Asked what the most permanent medium is, Kahle doesn't miss a beat: 'The clay tablets of the Babylonians. Their libraries are readable to us today.'
Go and read these articles for more examples.
Link: Long Views » Blog Archive » The Digital Ice Age
Link: Long Views » Blog Archive » Publish or Perish
UPDATE 03mar08: I'm not the only one thinking of this (Steven Johnson).
STan and Alexis from Semapedia.org are at it again. THey've set up an easy way (link below) to add a friend on FaceBook. The catch is, you do it by reading the the friend's QR code on their shirt.
Quite interesting.
Link: Add to Friends Shirt | Facebook:
Should I talk to the stranger that just passed me on the street? The girl in elevator, the guy in the bookstore ... Everybody knows those moments where you wish you would have done something.
How about wearing a shirt that lets people get in touch with your facebook persona. We of course encourage you to talk to people, but sometimes there is just no opportunity. Scan the QR code on the shirt with your cellphone and add them to your facebook friends. Maybe they noticed you before too.
BTW, did I mention that here at Nokia you can now get a 2D barcode on your Nokia business card?
Dang, I was not able to finagle a trip to SFO to see this talk. But, if you live in the Bay Area, don't miss this!
Link: Long Now Seminars
Craig Venter is on a roll these days. He has revolutionized science twice already---with the human genome project and with metagenomic analysis of whole microbial populations. He is about to do it again by creating a new life form with a wholly synthesized genome. His memoir, A LIFE DECODED, is a thrilling read. He has shocking new perspectives to report every time he speaks in public.
Last month in Germany he said, "In one milliliter of sea water, there's a million bacteria and ten million viruses. In the air in this room---we've been doing the air genome project---all of you just during the course of this hour will be breathing in at least 10,000 different bacteria, and maybe 100,000 viruses.... This is the world of biology that we live in, that we don't see, where evolution takes place on a minute-to-minute basis.... The air that we breathe comes from these organisms. The future of the planet rests with these organisms. And the question is: If we take over the design of these organisms, does that really shift the balance in any way? Or is it such a small portion of what's out there that we'll only affect industrial processes, not the living planet?"
"Joining 3.5 Billion Years of Microbial Invention," Craig Venter, Herbst Theater, San Francisco, 7pm, MONDAY, February 25. The lecture starts promptly at 7:30pm. Admission is free (a $10 donation is always welcome, not required).
The Herbst Theater is downtown at the Civic Center on Van Ness at McAllister (inside the War Memorial Veterans Building).
Saying that the Long Now seminars are great is starting to feel repetitive. So, please go out and listen to ALL of them.
I've caught up with all the seminars that have been made available. One that I want to point out is Juan Enriquez's seminar on biology, politics, evolution, and science (link to post on seminar, below).
Wow.
He's such a low key speaker, but delivers such strong points. (though if you look at some of the comments in the post linked below, some folks were not as pleased)
There were a few items he mentioned that were pretty interesting:
1) He's friends with Craig Venter and traveled for a time on Venter's yacht, Sorcerer II, which was traveling the oceans, sampling micro-organisms every 200 miles by sequencing the whole she-bang. It's one more amazing Nobel-worthy thing Venter has been doing that has absolutely upended biology, genomics, and science. Enriquez called it the age of Metagenomics.
Of note, off all the organisms that they sequenced, about 75% were absolutely new. That's 75%. New. It really made clear the prevalence of microorganisms in the ocean and points to microbes being half the biomass on Earth. And these organisms are critical to the health of the planet and we are risking up-turning the cart through warming and acidification of the oceans.
2) In his lateral thinking way, Enriquez pointed out that the gas in coal mines is due to bacterial digestion of the coal. He said that mining is so dangerous, why don't we just use bacteria and pipe the gas out safely? It sure would be better than strip-mining. Heh.
3) He went off on superbugs, bacteria that are resistant to every antibiotic we can throw at it. He blames it in part to our (inevitable) cleanliness in hospitals. As we wipe everything down, only the hardiest can survive. And then, we provide these bugs a great chance to infect people as we hack them open in the very same areas.
Made me pause and think about how we do medicine.
4) He also had a good comment on the decrease in the number of new drugs pharma has been able to come out with. He ascribes that in part to the mounting difficulty in passing safety standards. He called it the 'Precautionary Principle' - we are forcing pharma to make drugs that kill no one. But, how many thousand will die without the drug? He called on folks to weigh the needs of the very many versus the needs of the very few.
Kevin Kelly, a Long Now founder, suggested Enriquez call his view the 'Pro-actionary Principle'.
Link: Long Views » Blog Archive » Juan Enriquez 'Mapping Life':
"All life is imperfectly transmitted code," Enriquez began, "and it is promiscuous." Thus discoveries like the one last month of an entire bacterial genome inside the DNA of a fruitfly is exploding the old tree-of-life models of evolution. The emerging map replaces gene lineages with gene webs.
I've been a big proponent of teaching machines by doing. I don't mean that the machine is 'watching' my move and guessing what is going on, but that in the process of using the machine, explicit links are create, much like a path is warn across a park by the folks who use it.
Link: BuzzMachine » Blog Archive » The internet is the social network:
Yes, but the problem is that this relies on explicit, semantic links we just don’t use. It wants us to include rel= links when we link to someone defining the relationship. I just don’t see that happening. Sometime ago, the semantic folks wanted us to put vote links in (marking them as positive or negative); it never took off.
Here’s Brad Fitzpatrick of Google explaining the API:
I believe the killer social graph app will be the one that sniffs and understands our relationships without our having to take explicit action or by exploiting the actions we take for different reasons.
I grew up thinking that nations should be the scale at which people are governed. I could not understand why Israel didn't just make all the Palestinians Israeli, why the Irish and British couldn't just let Northern Ireland be part of the Republic of Ireland. And, as the Balkans, well, balkanized, and the Soviet Union collapsed, why was everyone moving towards smaller units of government centered around cultural lines?
Well, I'm past that. I am beginning to see that the end of the last 10 years has been more about the end of nations, much like the end of the 19th century was the end of empires.
Taking this logic to a further level, I really think current national governments will lose their power as cities and regions (city-states, anyone?) rise in political and economic strength.
For example, many states in the US are clashing with the federal government, making stricter environmental laws. Cities like London and New York are no longer really part of their nation, becoming true city-states, their mayors meeting heads of state for political and economic reasons.
And, empires fell apart as a sort of national identity arose. But, now, there are regional identities that are stronger still, and cut along cultural lines.
So, are the Kosovars Albanian or Serbian? Neither. They are Kosovar, much like the Austrians are not German, but Austrian, or the French Swiss are Swiss, not French.
It'll be interesting to watch Kosovo form a real government and economy now that the question of their identity is resolved (at least for them). There's a lot a work ahead for them and the global economy was not set up for tiny states to prosper in.
Link: Frenzy greets the new Kosovo - The Boston Globe:
In a move that inflamed tensions in this volatile region, the ethnic Albanian government of Kosovo yesterday proclaimed the province independent from Serbia, forming a new and very troubled country in Europe.
There were these guys at LIFT 08 who were digitizing everyone's writing so that we could post and comment in our own handwriting. It's just awesome.
Alas, they won't give us the fonts. Just yet.
Link: Fontself website usage | LIFT conference:
The Clock of the Long Now will have chimes that play 10 tones, in unique combination, every day over the course of 10,000 years.
I tend to listen to a bunch of Long Now seminars in a row and noticed something about the chimes played at the start and end of every recording: they are the same.
So that got me thinking. They should be playing different chimes every day. And, I am not sure about the algorithm, but if you can calculate the chimes for each day, then why not play the chime particular to the day of the seminar?
I also started wondering if there was somewhere I could hear the chime for a particular day. And indeed there is. Seam M Burke, on his site Interglacial, has built a generator of MIDI chimes for any date. Brian Eno, in his exploration of the chimes (he was a big part of the idea behind the 10 notes and chimes) came out with a CD, too. The folks at the EMUSIC-L site also have been toying with this, trying to make better tones through their own chimes generator (MIDI is a bit ugh), but I haven't played with it.
from: Clock: Chime Generator (Long Now Foundation site)
Yup. These social network aggregation services are popping up all over.
Check out this video Socialthing made of what they are offering (link below, too). Pretty cool. Though I already see a few big holes.
Link [via Alex]: socialthing!: Get your digital life in order
socialthing! is a digital life manager that puts what you do online into one place. See everything that's going on with your friends in all the sites you use, post stuff to multiple places at once and more!
Link: Socialthing! blog » Blog Archive » st!cast 01 - Friends and Adding Services:
This is the first screencast showing some of Socialthing!’s features. In it I show you how to add services to your Socialthing! account, how to group a person’s many online identities into one identity (that person) and how to leave us feedback.
I just can't believe that Yahoo! Design closed down (link to rumour below). I think the department might have closed and that there are designers elsewhere in the company. Or do they just outsource it? I'll have to follow this story.
Some days I think _our_ company can be rude to our Design group. But, we still value them - design is in the company's blood (heh, it's a Finnish company, right?).
Link [via David Smith]: RIP: Yahoo! Design closed down - data visualization & visual design - information aesthetics:
an anonymous source just informed me the entire Yahoo! Design Innovation team (once coined yHaus) has been laid off, part of a closing-down of all innovation teams at Yahoo. in addition, their work has been completely removed from their original website. infosthetics has posted their work here & here, & luckily had stored some copies of their works locally.
infosthetics feels bad for the people involved. how does Yahoo! wants to increase their share price by firing creative, talented people? Google, Swivel, Many Eyes, Stamen: are you hiring?
Hm. Social networking aggregation fused with mobiles is THE thing of 2008. I saw this coming from a long way off, but am surprised that Yahoo was able to come out with something already.
But, it's good to see the heat getting turned up. I think there will be many ways to do this and everyone will be able to learn from those that come before them.
There's also a video (see below) showing what it's all about.
Link [via atmasphere]: Yahoo launches OneConnect | Webware : Cool Web apps for everyone:
On Tuesday, the company announced at the GSMA Mobile World Congress here OneConnect, a new tool that allows mobile phone users to aggregate their social-networking updates and messaging in one spot on their phones. The service integrates directly with a phone user's address book and allows people to share status updates and messages from a variety of messaging and social-networking platforms. This means it can provide status updates from Facebook or MySpace.com as well as provide access to e-mail and archived instant-messaging chats.
