Author: gulley

Through the magic of web services, people are able to brew up kaleidascopic (and often very entertaining) combinations these days. Taggregator is a site that tastefully combines the results returned by tag searches at both Flickr and del.icio.us. The juxtaposition is a treat for the left and right brain. Hmmm… is that why they put them on the page that way?

Here are some fun riffs.

• alchemy
• clutter
• zen

And here’s one that splits the meaning right down the middle of the screen: macro. Can you think of another good word that means such completely different things to the typical del.icio.us audience than to the Flickr audience?

On New Year’s Day model airplane enthusiasts around the world (well, mostly the U.S. and some in Europe) strapped digital cameras to their planes and took some snapshots:
A Day In The Life of AP. The resulting set of shots is pretty impressive: check out this shot of the Golden Gate Bridge. There are also some pictures of places where it seems there isn’t much else to do. It doesn’t take much imagination to see how quickly this can be turned into dirt cheap Pentagon-style surveillance. Between satellites and model airplanes, your backyard secrets had better be camouflaged from now on. (spotted on Gizmodo)

From Roy (and ultimately by way of Patently Obvious) I found this nifty approach to book writing. Lawrence Lessig, the Stanford lawyer who is busy single-handedly bringing the legal profession into the modern age, decided to release a second edition of his book Code. But rather than do all the work himself, he’s turning the whole thing into a wiki and recruiting people to help him edit it. He says “My aim is not to write a new book; my aim is to correct and update the existing book. But I’m eager for advice and expert direction.”

This isn’t as bold an experiment as truly opening the book up to editing Wikipedia-style. After all, people have had their books edited by trusted colleagues since the days of the first papyrus-back potboiler. But having standardized wiki software to make the process painless is new, and Lessig is good enough to donate any money raised by the sale of the book to the Creative Commons fund. And I imagine it’s only a matter of time before true wiki books emerge. If it’s a novel way to write nonfiction, it’s a novel way to write a novel too. Has anyone seen a wiki novel yet?

Newsflash! After I wrote that last sentence, I thought to myself, well of course wiki novels must exist. Let’s go Googling and find one. I was not disappointed. By the time you follow this link to Rick Heller’s open source novel, I’m sure it will have mutated, but this opening paragraph is pure magic:

SMART GENES: AN OPEN SOURCE NOVEL. PROLOGUE

When Sandra flicked on the bedroom light, she didn’t expect to see a postman with a shotgun. Sandra started to scream, stifling the reflex midway so it sounded like a loud, undignified hiccup. Resting on the bed was a man in a blue uniform with an American eagle patch. “I’ll kill you first,” he said. Beneath his left hand, a shotgun lay in plain sight upon the bedding. Kill me first? Sandra was stunned. What would he do second? Stuff her body in a mailbag, and bury it under a pile of dead letters?

After a page or so of prose along these lines, Chapter One commences with this.

http://texas-holdem.freeservers.com
http://play-online-casino.freeservers.com
http://play-online-casino.freeservers.com/online-poker.html
http://play-online-casino.freeservers.com/blackjack.html

and so on for several hundred lines. You’ll have to read the whole thing to see how Sandra ends up in the casino. So there you have it. Not only does a wiki novel exist but it is a smashing success.

I’ve been having terrible problems with my net access for the last few days, and the experience has taught me two lessons. One, how barbaric it is to connect to the net at sluggish baby-modem speeds. It really feels like a terrible handicap once you’re used to zipping from page to page. This must have been what it was like living out on the frontier. Lesson two is that Bloglines and RSS newsfeeds shine all the more brightly in a low bandwidth situation, since I can check on the contents of many sites without paying the download cost of all their fancy ads, decorations, and Javascript gewgaws.

This reminded me of something I had recently read on Jay Rosen’s PressThink blog: Top Ten Ideas of ’04: “Content Will be More Important than its Container”. In it he talks about how mainstream media is losing control of the branded container that surrounds their words. He quotes Tom Curley, CEO of the Associated Press, as saying “Content will be more important than its container… That’s a big shift for old media to come to grips with… Killer apps, such as search, RSS and video-capture software such as Tivo — to name just a few — have begun to unlock content from any vessel we try to put it in.” Later in the same piece, Rosen mentions that John Markoff glibly plays down blogs and feeds.

When Markoff said that in ten years he would still be “writing for paper,” he had overlooked something rather important. Already in 2003, a majority of Times readers were online. Markoff and most of his colleagues believe they work for a print newspaper with an online edition. Psychologically, they’re still writing for “the paper.” For most of the readers, however, the New York Times is an online newspaper that also sells a print edition.

Perhaps I should assume that many of you have never seen the print version of the Paracelsus Rambles weblog. So sad.

When’s the last time you used the word “coruscate“? My friend Kevin Durkin, a poet himself, has written a book review of the recently released Collected Poems of the American poet Richard Wilbur. If you don’t have time to read the book, at least you can read the review. You’re sure to coruscate at your next cocktail party.

Collection shows Richard Wilbur’s keen eye, chiseled phrases (Philadelphia Inquirer). Unfortunately, the Inquirer does make you fill out a free registration form.

I know I’ve been talking about Wikipedia a lot lately, but take a look at this and see if you don’t agree that it’s cool. Follow the link to see live recent changes to the site. You’ll see changes to articles flying by as they’re being submitted (which is quite rapidly). If you see one that strikes your fancy, like, say, Abelian von Neumann algebra, then click on it to go to the article, or better yet, click on the diff link and see only the part that’s being changed. This reminds me of those old pages that showed realtime search queries, only instead of sucking knowledge out of cyberspace, this is working the other way around.

And in what I promise will be absolutely my last wiki link for the next fifteen minutes, here is wiki creator (and now Microsoft employee) Ward Cunningham being interviewed for Wikimedia’s Quarto publication. Ever wonder what a wiki is? Here’s the answer from the guy who invented them.

Here’s what I think a wiki is: content before community. Low latency to correction. The workflow of submission starts with publication – publish and then edit. Trivial creation of new pages, to let them grow to the right size. And a community provided by RecentChanges — the ability to see what other editors are doing, encouraging visitors to go from readers to authors to editors.

In other words, lower the barriers to participation and stand back.

Great holy creeping cows! This is an example of the unexpected harvest reaped by those who invest in web services. Flickr, the oft-commented-upon photo web site, has a nice web services API (application programming interface) to talk to their site. On the strength of this, a San Francisco company called Stamen Design built something called Mappr that places Flickr photos on a map of the U.S. The result is a marvel of UI design.

Highlights: I like the slider for which the little slider “thumb” is the number you’ve selected. Also, be sure and look at the postcard project for Eric Snowdeal’s little (prematurely delivered) boy.

Mappr is a parable for our new age. When you open up your interface, riches come your way. From which direction you can never tell.

Those Wikipedia people never stop to catch their breath. Every time I look up they’ve launched yet another flypaper knowledge collaboration. Sometimes I want to tell them, “there’s a whole lot of knowledge out there… you don’t have to do it all at once.” They’ve got wikipedias in Saxon and wiktionaries in Sanskrit. Now they’ve got a project to organize information about all the life forms on the planet: Wikispecies. We’ve got URLs for your address in cyberspace, GeoURLs for your location on the planet, and now, here is your Wikispecies taxonomic URL (taxoURL?) that locates you on the tree of life:

Homo sapiens

It’s a nice idea, and it seems easier to navigate than the other similar tool I’ve used, the NIH’s NCBI Taxonomy browser. Like a lot of the Wikipedia foundation’s projects, it’s currently very thin on content. But I suppose it will grow like a weed, as all things wiki tend to.

There is a complete list of the various wiki projects on (what else?) Metawiki.

Ever since I plugged into the blog network, I’ve liked the metaphor of blogs as neurons. Jon Udell here writes the essay I wish I had written: InfoWorld: The network is the blog. There’s a shorter summary of the same thing on Jon’s Radio.

Blogs are natural filters and amplifiers. Owing to the quirks of their authors, they participate in many (seemingly) unrelated themed subnetworks which they are constantly forming, dissolving, and reforming. This is a good approximation of actual neural circuitry. But suppose something more literal is going on. Suppose that what started as a metaphor turned out to be a fairly direct observation of the fact. The question that everyone is asking is when does this information network, blogs and all, turn into some sort of cohesive entity that is more than simply a big noisy network? To put that in “cosmic” terms, as Udell might say, when does the network wake up? When does it become the sort of intelligent noosphere that de Chardin dreamed about? And if it does wake up, is there any reason to suppose we could detect it? It may be marveling at us right now even as we marvel at it.

Everybody look up and say “hi!”

I have been waiting for someone to do this: use a cheap motion detector and an old cell phone to act as a low tech LoJack car theft detector. It’s a really simple concept: when the car starts rolling, it calls (or sends a short text message to) you, the police, or whoever you tell it to. There are lots of ways to make a system like this expensive, but this is impressively low rent: BLADOX Turbo Motion mobile phone accessory

The next step would be to attach the phone to a GPS receiver. That way the phone could tell you exactly where it is as the perp speeds away. Put that together with some realtime mapping software, and you’ve got a scene almost straight out of Goldfinger.