Swallowing an umbrella
"The sword passes within millimetres of the heart, aorta, and other vitals but, surprisingly, few deaths related to sword swallowing have been described. A Canadian sword swallower did die, but that was after swallowing an umbrella." (from BMJ.com, the General Medical Journal, online, via MetaFilter.)
You do learn the darndest things on the web, don't you? Technorati Tags: funny
Wiki as in Wikipedia
I assume you know about Wikis and the Wikipedia. If not, click on the links to the left and you'll both find out and experience it, in one fell swoop. On BlogBridge we use a Wiki as a very lightweight project collaboration tool. Minimalist eRoom if you like. That's the kind that most often occurs to me. But if you think about Wikipedia articles work, they are actually meant to properly describe or define something that exists and has a name. In other words, they specifically are meant to be objective and timely. I've worked at more than one company where we, the CEO, or whoever was trying to write down , invent, or discover, for example, a company value statement , or a company strategy statement. It's a painful process on a lot of levels and when you are all done, it's not even clear that you've accomplished anything. What if you pretended that you were writing an entry in Wikipedia, for example of the company value statement. As a Wiki page, anyone in the organization could read, write, correct, update, clarify and append to the statement. It would be an interesting experiment if you could get it to work. If you did, you might have a better chance of getting some kind of common understanding and alignment, let alone buy in and agreement, than with other more top-down approaches. [inspired by a talk at the BlogOn conference, unfortunately, I can't remember which one.] Technorati Tags: blogon2005
For advanced nerds only: How the deathstar works
From How Stuff Works :
"There is no question that the last few years of world history have seen a fair share of chaos and disorder. With so much global unrest, governments worldwide are struggling to devise new methods to maintain order. The Galactic Empire's solution to order is the Death Star."
Read the whole thing! How Stuff Works has come a long way, with sections on Science, Health, Entertainment etc. Check it out!
Technorati Tags: cool
Google API -> Open Standard
I really like this idea that Dave Winer has put forward: "Let's make the Google API an open standard", where he says, among other things:
"We've asked for a plug-in architecture for search engines, and if we can't have that, a solid easy-to-program API is a pretty good alternative."
Read the whole thing - there are some really good insights there. Think of it, you could build a "search powered" application. Ok you can do that now, but you are limited to powering your API with Google and no-one else. What if you could let the user select which search engine to use? Google? Yahoo? Or some upstart whipper-snapper? If you are familiar with the various utilities that exist to make it easy to post to your blog (BlogJet, Ecto, and so on - there are several but those two are my favorites,) this is analogous. A general utility, allowing the user to choose from several back ends with different strengths and weaknesses. Isn't that cool? I get a nice graphical UI to post to my blog, whatever blog service I use. Powerful. And not coincidentally, also enabled by an API (the Meta weblog API) that Dave put forward some years ago. Nice! Technorati Tags: API, blog, google
[GEEK] OPML Validator
I just came across Dave Winer's new, beta, OPML Validator, which is a welcome development. While there is an OPML spec, having a validator too is a great, pragmatic , concrete way to give a big thumbs up or down to a particular piece of XML From the very start BlogBridge has supported OPML for import and export, as well as for various internal representations and communications. We obviously have done our best to write valid OPML, as best as we understood what that was. Still, what trumps every theoretical position on OPML validity are user cries of: "Hey, I can't import your OPML into XXX", or "Hey, you fail to import my OPML, but YYY has no problem with it." Our approach to this situation has been to follow what has been called "Postel's Law" (which I also learned from Dave Winer, ages ago): "Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send." And this has worked well so far, although there have been some sticky wickets that we've had to deal with. You end up feeling like you are chasing your tail trying to accommodate all the odd dialects. So, it's great that Dave has now put forward the OPML validator. Running our stuff through it, we do quite well. Click here to see the results of running the validator against a pretty big example of our opml. There are just two errors, each repeated multiple times:
_" An
element with more than just a "text" attribute should have a "type" attribute indicating how the other attributes are to be interpreted." _ _" An
element should only have known attributes." _
__ In each case we have specified additional attributes beyond the basic ones. Specifically they are: rating, queryParam, queryType, tags, tagsDescription, tagsExtended and icon. Some of those probably deserve to become part of the core set, while others somehow will have to become part of an extensibility model. We'll participate in the discussions as they develop. More to come! Technorati Tags: blogbridge, OPML
One more little meme
Here's another cute one I came across, at BlogOn 2005: " Trojan Mouse Strategy" - when you try to develop grass roots adoption of your software, bypassing IT. Technorati Tags: meme
Ease of use?
I recently had to buy a new cell phone, and learning how to use it reminded me again about how complicated these things are. How many out there have not bothered to learn something as simple even as programming in some commonly called numbers? I know I probably use only 30% of the features. A buddy of mine had the idea that what the cell phone makers should do is to design a cell phone specifically for the elderly.What would it look like? Probably exactly like the phone they use at home. Big buttons and hardly any functions. While we are modifying cell phones, who is going to be the first build a pedometer into a cell phone. Perfect for aging baby boomers suddenly worrying about their health! Technorati Tags: cellphone, babyboomers
Thinking about business models
Inquisitor is a really cool program that augments the search box in Safari (which for you heathens out there is the default Mac OS X web browser.) It's kind of hard to explain just what it does - it's kind of a magical word completion thingie that guesses, based on other searches and who knows what else , what you are going to search for. But I am not writing about Inquisitor, although I recommend it highly. Here's a post by it's author, Dave, who is trying to figure out how or whether he can make some money with his creation.
"Why am I considering pay-per-download? Well, one advantage is that it's far easier to do than a full-blown registration system. While the levy is very small, if everyone gives a little then everyone benefits. It seems more equitable that way. Alas, it is true that there's no solid way to enforce the levy. The software could be traded easily between friends or posted on an unauthorized website. The former I view as a form of viral marketing and the latter is traceable and can be dealt with as a clear-cut breach of license." (from David Watanabe's blog)
The question of when and how and how much to begin charging users of BlogBridge occupies me from time to time. Our core objective right now is to get BlogBridge into everybody's hands - everybody in our target market that is - so called "Infojunkies" or "Professionals." But this won't be forever. The beauty of a project such as this is that we can be clever, innovative or at least experimental so all new and different ideas are worth thinking about. Technorati Tags: blogbridge, businessmodel
You say tomato – I say tomahto
The street filled with tomatoes, midday, summer, light is halved like a tomato, its juice runs through the streets. In December, unabated, the tomato invades the kitchen, it enters at lunchtime, takes its ease on countertops, among glasses, butter dishes, blue saltcellars. It sheds its own light, benign majesty. Unfortunately, we must murder it: the knife sinks into living flesh, red viscera a cool sun, profound, inexhaustible, populates the salads of Chile, happily, it is wed to the clear onion, and to celebrate the union we pour oil, essential child of the olive, onto its halved hemispheres, pepper adds its fragrance, salt, its magnetism; it is the wedding of the day, parsley hoists its flag, potatoes bubble vigorously, the aroma of the roast knocks at the door, it's time! come on! and, on the table, at the midpoint of summer, the tomato, star of earth, recurrent and fertile star, displays its convolutions, its canals, its remarkable amplitude and abundance, no pit, no husk, no leaves or thorns, the tomato offers its gift of fiery color and cool completeness. By Pablo Neruda Technorati Tags: interesting, poetry
Pop!Tech Memes
Pop!Tech 2005 was a great conference, again. I made notes only when something struck me as interesting or memorable or quotable, so this list of memes is very quirky just based on my in-the-moment reactions!
" Barcode of Life" - Robert Hanner. My summary of this is that it is a specific gene sequence that can be found across a very wide spectrum of organisms, which has the characteristic that it is more or less the same in individuals from a single species and very different in individuals from different species. Such a sequence can be used to establish the borders between species. See Barcode of Life.
" Buy something, and get not only the thing, but the factory with which to build it." Robert Hanner. A metaphor for thinking about what makes life special - the thing can reproduce itself, hence it also acts like a factory. His company is ProtoLife.
" A right handed person, if they lose their right arm, will quickly become a left handed person. They will have no problem learning to use their left hand as well as they used to use their right hand."Todd Kuiken, discussing amputees and prosthetics. Also remember Jesse Sullivan, the patient who demonstrated an amazing new kind of prosthetic.
" Backing up the Biosphere" - Peter Diamandis, impresario extraordinaire, director of the X Prize. Describes vividly why the human race should work on establishing a presence in places beyond earth. It's the ultimate off-site storage for life. Also, take a look at the X Prize Store
" The day before something is a major breakthrough it was a crazy idea that would never work."Another meme from Peter Diamandis.
" Methane Hidrate", the ice that burns!
" Soon there will be more people living in Bombay than on the whole Australian continent.", Suketu Metha
" In Bombay there are sections with more than 1 million people per square mile!, also Suketu Metha.
" That's not a vision… that's a hallucination!", Bunker Roy, founder of the Barefoot College in India.
" Indians are the second smartest people on earth … after the Chinese!" - According to Bunker Roy, supposedly a comment made by Bill Gates in India. See Christian Science Monitor.
" Go from the Aha! to the So What?" Slogan of the Push Conference, a conference that some people are describing as the "new Pop!Tech"
(By the way, different folks blogged Pop!Tech in gory detail. Check out the front page for a list of bloggers.) Technorati Tags: poptech