Well it’s not really ‘coming’ – it was here all along, just dormant. Here’s the down-lo: BarCamp Boston 3 May 17-18, 2008 http://barcampboston.org/ BarCamp is an unConference, organized on the fly by attendees, for attendees. There is no registration fee, but you don’t just attend a BarCamp — you can participate in discussions, demo your projects, or join into another cooperative event. Topics may include, but are not limited to: open source software, startups, UI design, entrepreneurship, AJAX, hardware hacking, robotics, mobile computing, bioinformatics, RSS, Social Software, programming languages, and the future of technology. More information and free registration at: http://barcampboston.org/I’m coming. Are you?
You might have missed the announcement of Microsoft Mesh. Cycnical me: these grand strategies come and go. I believe this is the second or perhaps third major iteration of Microsoft’s strategy in this area, in each case without an actual scaling implementation of same.At any rate, if you are interested in the whole memo that supposedly started it all, check this post Full Text of Ray Ozzie Mesh Memo from ReadWriteWeb: "Excerpt: In its early days the web grew through the explosion of information portals as gateways to content, marketplaces for commerce, and communications tools such as email, IM and newsgroups that drove a sense of community on the internet. Over time, the significance of these “3 Cs” – content, commerce, and community – has expanded tremendously, growing in ways through which they‟ve become intermixed and mutually reinforcing."
Check this post Twitter’s Lead Architect Leaves: It’s Not You, It’s Me from Mashable!: "While I’ll give Cook the benefit of the doubt, I can’t think of a more pressure packed job than being responsible for the scaling of Twitter, a service that has continuously struggled to keep up with its growing user base. Was Cook forced out as the scape goat for Twitter’s technical woes? Who knows, but as someone that was with Twitter since the beginning and likely an owner of some valuable stock options in the redhot-in-spite-of-itself startup, it seems unlikely he’d leave completely on his own terms."
Check this post Grou.ps Launches Public Beta from ReadWriteWeb: "There are a lot of ways to collaborate online – wikis, forums, social networks – but there are very few providers that package all the tools together that a group might need. Grou.ps, a social groupware provider, aims to address that problem by providing its users one single package of integrated tools."Looks like it’s worth a look…
A really interesting article for anyone interested in social networks and their role and impact in our society. “… I want to take a moment to make a meta point here. I have been traipsing through the country talking to teens and I’ve been seeing this transition for the past 6-9 months but I’m having a hard time putting into words. Americans aren’t so good at talking about class and I’m definitely feeling that discomfort. It’s sticky, it’s uncomfortable, and to top it off, we don’t have the language for marking class in a meaningful way. So this piece is intentionally descriptive, but in being so, it’s also hugely problematic. I don’t ...
Amazing idea from Scott Adams. Dilbert Mashups. Check this post What’s Your Best Dilbert Punch Line? from Mashable!: “Dilbert has a huge following and I’m sure lots of people will have fun making their own punch lines for the popular comic, and there are even a few sharing options (embedding, email, social bookmarking, etc.) that will allow those Dilber writer-wannabes to share their humorous wit with friends across the web. One drawback, though, is the fact that you can only create a mashup for the current day’s comic strip.” Check it out!
I just turned on a new laptop I bought for my father in law – amazingly a 1 Gig Mem, 1.7MHz, 90Mb computer for around $700. Nice. But one thing: HP just doesn’t seem to care about the user experience. Or is it Microsoft for allowing it? Or is it ourselves for forcing Microsoft to make Vista so open that their OEMs are practically forced to go nuts? I’ve written in the past that I thought at...
I just wrote a few brief tutorials that I thought might be of interest to you and, well, everyone. Please check them out – if you find them useful, please pass them on to your friends! “What’s the difference between a blog and a web site?” – That perennial question that people first discovering blogging often ask. My short and sweet explanation. “How to put a blog on my web site”– A brief explanation why anyone with a web site might want to consider adding a blog to it, and how you might do that “What are the best news blogs” – How do you go about finding the best blogs about current events?
I am advising a client who is interested in reaching out to a huge existing community of folks who they, historically and today, can count as their natural constituency.The problem is, they don’t have their names or email addresses and want to connect to them, and them to each other. The question is, how to do that. I explored three options with them: create a Facebook ‘Group’ and/or Application, create a Ning social network, or create a new and beautifully designed new web site to serve as the hub of the effort. Here are some of my tentative conclusions. Outreach: No matter what approach is taken, a big part of the effort will be outreach, via email or google ads or something al...
People wonder about Wikipdia and what it’s good for. This is an example from a while back, of Wikipedia at it’s best. Lots of details, edited and co-edited by many people giving you a feeling that there’s less bias: Wikipedia on the Virgina Tech Tragedy
(Click for enlargement) Upon updating to the latest Mac OS X 10.5, a.k.a Leopard, I noticed that Skype was ridiculously slow, hanging and doing other ugly things. A search of the web didn’t find any useful ideas, at least that worked for me. Here’s what fixed it. In Skype “General Preferences” there’s an option to “Show Address Book Contacts”. Well I have a fairly huge address book – about 3000 people. Somehow Skype was driving itself crazy trying to show them. Unclicking the “Show Address Book Contacts” check box solved it for me.
Look closely at the dialog box on the right. It’s Mac OS X info sheet for an attached Windows computer. Now look even more closely at the simulated screen on the image of an ugly big CRT monitor. See the BSOD? Who said they don’t have a sense of humor?
Saturday Night Liveis having the best season in years. Consistently much funnier than last year or the year before. Last night, Christopher Walken again was extremely funny: the writing was funny and his delivery was funnier. But. It is extremely distracting that Mr. Walken doesn’t even try to pretend to appear to be addressing his counterpart in the skit. He so obviously is reading cue cards that no matter how hard I tried to suspend disbelief, all I could notice was how he was looking in the wrong direction.I wonder how that happens. Did he not rehearse? Is it, for some wacky reason, on purpose? Can he just not remember his lines?...
Last week I went to the monthly “WebInno” – web innovators group –meeting at the Sonesta in Cambridge, Massachusetts (USA). I am quite impressed with the attendance and the quality of the people presenting. The gathering was quite crowded and the buzz was very loud, lots of dynamic discussions going on all over the place, people trading war stories and comparing products. It was stimulating and fun, and I plan to go next month again. In the meanwhile, Don Dodge of Microsoft writes a post “...
I’ve wondered and written before about the ‘downside’ or ‘risk’ of building your application based on one of the excellent SAAS services from Amazon. And I do think they are excellent. But check this post Amazon Web Services Gets Another Hiccup from TechCrunch: "Amazon does not guarantee 100 percent uptime for its Web Services, although it does strive to achieve that. And data centers go down all the time, no matter who is hosting your data.But more and more companies are relying on Amazon to be able to scale their computing resources on demand and do it cheaply by paying only for what they need. Many Web startups are building their entire businesses on top of Amazon’s Web Services, and even an hour of unavailability is unacceptable. At least this one happened during the middle of the night."
I just came back from the theatre, the Huntington Theatre, Boston’s, production of a brand new play called “The Cry of the Reed” by Sinan Ünel. This play and production is truly amazing, great, dramatic, thought provoking, and overall excellent. We were discussing this play the whole drive home. Talking about war, religion, morality, ethics, human nature, theatre and drama. I like seeing these productions before the pundits and professional reviewers decide if it’s any good. I went there tonight not even knowing what this play was about and happy not to have been influenced by some stupid reviewer. This world premiere better get a five star rating IMHO. Em. Yeah. I liked it.
Scott Adams as usual is hillarious in this post Doomsday Cult from The Dilbert Blog: "A Russian cult emerged from the cave they were hiding in while waiting for the end of the world. http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2008/04/01/doomsday-cult.html?ref=rss Allow me to give you some advice: If you ever decide to join a cult, the first thing you should ask about is the quality of their doomsday cave. A poorly constructed cave could kill you, and that would take most of the fun out of doomsday."
I bet you’ve not heard of another crazy-cool service from Google, Google Sets. I first read about Google Sets some months ago but didn’t bother looking until today, Sunday, when i saw this interesting article about Google Set’s patents. This is from that article: “Google Sets is one of the first services that were added to Google Labs and it’s a cool way to find list of related terms. Google Sets is a tool that generates lists from a small number of examples by using the web as a big pool of data. You enter some items and Google Sets finds other items that tend to co-occur frequently with your examples. For ...
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Look closely at the dialog box on the right. It’s Mac OS X info sheet for an attached Windows computer. Now look even more closely at the simulated screen on the image of an ugly big CRT monitor. See the