Tilting at windmills for a better tomorrow.
Hokey but fun: Transparent Screens. Move computer out of the way, shoot image of environs, make it your wallpaper, move computer back into place. Computer becomes window. This technique is similar to research that used to go into real-life cloaks of invisibility (the “chameleon effect”), though current experiments focus on preventing objects from reflecting and scattering light.
From my O’Reilly blog:
An old friend called in a panic the other day. The modem on her G3 lime iMac had crapped out, and she needed to get online that evening. We verified that she could still get a dial tone on the line. Had her reboot. No dice. “Still no broadband?,†I asked. “Maybe someday. Haven’t gotten around to it.â€
Started troubleshooting. “Click the blue apple icon in the top left of your screen,†I said. “I only have a rainbow apple.†Uh-oh. OS9 user on dial-up. How do people live? Time had caught up with her. Fortunately she had a bit of cash. Told her to order DSL, and meanwhile, I’d pick up a new iMac to get her online by evening. A new Mac is a very expensive modem — even as a stopgap — but the time was ripe.
Just stumbled upon StumbleUpon, a fascinating mashup of del.iciou.us, Friendster, and “I’m Feeling Lucky” — bookmark rating/ranking/reviews plus social networking plus serendipity, designed to help you break out of surfing habits and discover things you wouldn’t have otherwise. Initially thought the whole thing was just an elaborate Firefox extension and would therefore be in use by a limited audience, but soon realized it’s a well-established web service that just happens to have an FF extension.
Very first stumble landed me at jacksonpollack.org, a nifty Flash-based full-view splatter paint application, which Miles loved.
I’m “shacker” on the service – hook up if you’re in.
Technorati Tags: networking, social
Meebo is a service that integrates AIM, YIM, Jabber, and MSN chat through a web-based interface. From a Meebo blog entry on their reliance on statistical analysis to drive development iterations:
Our intuition is often off. Two releases ago, we considered eliminating the “New user?†and “Forgot your password?†links on the front meebo login page. Before doing so, we decided to track how many users clicked on the links. Good thing we didn’t eliminate them – turns out that 11,000+ meebo users depend upon these links daily!
I’ve seen this over and over again. No matter how many times you encourage users to think of passwords as if they were their ATM PINs, people have too many of them, and too many that they don’t use often enough to remain committed to memory. There are a wealth of password management tools on the market, but those aren’t going to be used by the non-geeks who need them the most.
This is a huge untapped market, but the nature of the problem dictates that it be solved by OS vendors, not shareware vendors. Apple’s made a start of it with the Keychain utility, but the interface is overwhelming to average users. Prediction: The next releases of OS X and Windows will include simple (and hopefully very secure) mass-password-management services.
via Searchblog
If Microsoft has its way (and when don’t they?), their own WMP image compression format will eventually replace JPEG. MS claims to be able to cut file size in half at the same quality levels, and to sit up and do tricks like rotating an image without decoding/encoding. And yes, the format will be available to non-Windows platforms and devices, though there will be a licensing hook (that’s the part that gives me the willies).
What I’ve never understood is why the the open source world missed the boat with PNG, which is free of licensing restrictions and also does neat tricks, but lacks lossy compression and is therefore totally unsuitable for photographic work on the web (and also lacks the ability to store EXIF data). Yes, PNG was designed primarily as an alternative to GIF, but since they had the opportunity to build a format from the ground up, why didn’t they take the opportunity to tackle the two things we use images for the most (digital photography and photos on the web)? By not doing so, PNG left the door open for yet another proprietary format to take hold.
MS also has half a dozen excellent new fonts in the hopper – the six Cs. I could see myself growing to love Calibri.
Technorati Tags: fonts, photography, microsoft
Some talk over the past few months about how Digg has overcome Slashdot in popularity (Kottke has a few charts from last January, but the numbers continue to rise). Aside from the obvious fact that Slashdot’s audience is technical while Digg’s is general interest, there’s another point I find fascinating:
Slashdot = A team of editors but no authors
Digg = No editors or authors
Digg’s model relies on UGC just like Slashdot, but replaces the editorial staff with algorithms supporting community. A very pure model, maximizing the internet’s collaborative potential.
Now, look at the number of comments on virtually any Digg or /. story — they absolutely eclipse the number of comments on any story at [name your favorite mainstream media (MSM) publication] (for those that even allow comments on normal stories). What is it about the community sites that engenders so much more discussion than traditionally journalistic sites that also happen to offer discussion features? Something about Digg and Slashdot makes readers feel like they’re part of something, in a way that virtually no MSM pub has been able to do.
If MSM really wants to tap into the juicy power of community, they need to somehow cultivate not just discussion, but collaboration and real participation. Part of it is technology, but it’s also about vibe. As long as they present themselves traditionally, with the air of stuffy authority, they’re not going to win the eyeballs of a generation that expects the internet to be a two-way discussion. There’s no reason you shouldn’t see the level of participation on Wall St. Journal or New York Times stories that you see on Digg stories.
It’s going to take a massive mindset shift at the old battleships. If they fail to make that kind of shift, the existing audience will move into nursing homes and be replaced by… no one.
MSM can’t just stand back and hand the store over to software services like Digg has, but they certainly have lessons to learn about how to tap into the bee hive.
Yes, I’ve been listening to Bob Cauthorn again.
On the surface, Google’s new Google Trends service seems like it could be really powerful. By graphing the relative search frequency of comma-separated terms, you get instant snapshots of the collective consciousness. Trouble is, Trends does a terrible job of reading your mind.
The problem isn’t that the service is in beta — it’s the difficulty of crafting queries that turn up results that actually do demonstrate search trends. Is “diesel” really searched on so much more frequently than other fuels? ethanol, hybrid, hydrogen, gasoline, diesel. Change “gasoline” to “gas” or “petrol” and the chart changes so dramatically that you realize the apparent “trends” are virtually meaningless.
This result seems plausible on the surface: emo, hardcore, punk, alternative. But look at the associated news items and you’re reminded that the word “alternative” can mean virtually anything. Remove it from the query for better results.
Comparing the popularity of mac, linux, windows is really hard. Should you have used “OS X” or “Mac OS” rather than “Mac?” How could you consolidate all three terms to act as one in the query?
More so than with normal searches, the ambiguity or double meanings of certain kinds of words have huge potential to skew results. Try comparing the popularity of internet video formats: quicktime, real, windows media. The results don’t work because “real” means so many things. And it’s very hard to tune the search with variants like “real media” or “realvideo.”
Here’s one that actually is relatively unambigous: beefheart, zappa. None of the terms have other meanings, and people searching on these terms would probably almost always use exactly those terms. Expanding this to captain beefheart, frank zappa yields almost exactly the same chart.
On the other hand, here’s one that can totally invert results if you’re insufficiently specfic: thelonious monk, john coltrane. Now compare: monk, coltrane. In the first query, “coltrane” is way more popular. In the second, “monk” is. But according to the related news items, few of the “Monk” results refer to Thelonious Monk at all. Pay attention.
How does it do with politics? democrats, republicans reflects an even split — it’s captured the zeitgeist. But house, senate does something surprising: I expected the word “house” to screw things up since it’s so generic, but the associated news items indicate that it seems to be contextualizing the query — the graph might actually be limiting the the term “house” to political contexts.
You don’t have to use the service comparatively. Bush approval rating doesn’t reflect the arc of Bush’s approval rating, but how often people searched on that phrase (though I’m not seeing the upward spike in recent months I would have expected).
Gross differences in popularity can also result in less meaningful graphs. If you chart mp3, ogg, aac, wmv, MP3 so mightily outweighs the others that the alternative trajectories are virtually indiscernible. Ditch the string “mp3” for a clear reading of how other formats stack up.
My attempt to find out which of the Banana Splits is more popular was a total flop, since there isn’t enough search data available for any term but “bingo” in bingo, drooper, fleegle, snorky.
Nor was I able to figure out whether more people prefer paper or plastic. This one can be better refined as paper bags, plastic bags, but the associated news items reminded me that the query really wasn’t addressing the question I thought I was asking. And besides, I would have to be careful to remember that people searching on “plastic bags” more than “paper bags” would only mean that people have more questions about plastic, not that people actually do choose plastic bags more often at the grocery store.
Fair enough, Trends throws a prominent disclaimer:
As a Google Labs product, it is still in the early stages of development. Also, it is based upon just a portion of our searches, and several approximations are used when computing your results. Please keep this in mind when using it.
The disclaimer should probably start with something like “Do not use Google Trends to settle bets!” The trouble with Trends goes deeper than it being in beta. Google is going to need a boatload of amazing AI to figure out the context problems. Amazing toy, but mired in caveats.
Nifty: Postfix Enabler turns any Mac into its own SMTP server, useful for laptop users finding themselves god-knows-where without an SMTP connection. Also includes a full POP/IMAP server, if you swing that way. Postfix is already built into OS X, but unless you’re running Server, you’ll have to jump through a few hoops to get it working. For $10, Postfix Enabler makes it happen in less than a minute, cleanly, con GUI.
Of course if your ISP requires mail to be routed through them, it’s not going to help a great deal – you’ll just have to configure Postfix to authenticate to the ISP anyway. But by telling your mail client to send outbound on localhost, sending at least feels buttery fast.
From my ORA blog: “iDisk uses DAV for remote disk mounting, and iCal lets me publish my calendars to a personal DAV server. Presumably, iPhoto photocasts to the iDisk DAV system, and iSync does the same. So why can’t I use my own DAV server to store all of my iSync data? Why can’t I photocast to my own DAV server?”
Apple could save a bundle on bandwidth by tapping into the unused cable/DSL bandwidth of its users. Macosrumors claims to have information pointing to the planned inclusion of a P2P system to be built into OS X 10.5 (Leopard). Users who elected to turn on the “Reward-Sharing system” would receive Apple credits, redeembable for iTMS downloads or other goodies.
Based on some rough math estimated for the proposal, the team pushing this concept believes they could cut Apple’s bandwidth costs by hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars per year and by always finding the closest peer-sharing hosts, the system would also save terabytes of Internet backbone bandwidth that is now used for Software Updates, QuickTime Movie Trailers, and iTunes Store downloads among other things.
Integrating P2P into the operating system at this level would be a sort of acknowledgment that P2P isn’t an activity users do on top of a network stack, but an emergent feature of the network itself, increasingly integral to everyday computing.
In the midst of the net neutrality debate, this has additional implications, since it means users with lots of dark fiber would suddenly be using lots more of their Comcast (etc.) bandwidth. Apple essentially making the internet healthier by distributing the load … but ultimately at the expense of the carriers.
thanks dsandler.org
Technorati Tags: bittorrent, itms, mac, p2p