May 2008
3 posts
daymakermovement →
HelpOthers.org →
G.I.F.T. →
February 2008
11 posts
Ohloh and Ontology Social Networking
I love this concept. Ohloh is a social networking site that is focused on the users and developers of open source software. It is a great way to raise awareness about the various open source software packages that are out there, and put users in touch with others who have been there - used or developed the software to meet their own needs. The other day, I was thinking about a problem that...
User Research Social Networking Service
Imagine a site where companies could identify products they are bringing to market, and potential users would voluntarily, directly guide their product development. Too often, user-centered design is still an afterthought in product design. It’s costly to do correctly, and the benefits (although very obvious after the fact) are hard to identify, quantify, and communicate. It’s...
Distributed Social Networking - Update
It looks like this idea is well underway, after all! Very exciting - check out FOAFRealm, and their wiki.
Global Warming, and Standards Organizations
Up until recently, in my mind, I had a picture of how International Goverments would work toward international standards to reduce global warming. Today, it occurred to me that there may be a problem with that approach. There are two fundamental issues at stake here: What targets, goals, etc. are necessary to prevent global warming (and various other environmental concerns). What compromises are...
Nonpartisan Social Network - Continued (Idea)
To avoid appearing too complicated, you would want to market each plugin separately. That is to say, don’t say “An RDF-triple store” that allows FOAF and other plugins. Instead, say a FOAF server, and then, a SIOC server (etc). The reality is that each would be a prepackaged RDF server with a plugin, and on the developer site you could find out more about that (and build a...
Nonpartisan Social Network - Continued (Idea)
In fact, why stop there? You could imagine similar needs for blog posts and all sorts of other structured data. Maybe a basic distrubuted triple-store server, with various plugins (written in scripting languages - python, ruby, perl) to handle specific types of data (FOAF, etc.). You could do very similar things using SPARQL update, but I think that having a server with plugins (as mentioned...
Nonpartisan Social Network (Idea)
One of the major reasons that DNS is so successful, and that OpenID seems to be catching on, is that they allow any person to set up a server. Each client decides which servers to trust, but servers can be set up by anyone at all. It seems to me that it will prove difficult (not impossible, but difficult) to make social graph data portable, so long as each company develops their own tools to...
Thinking Tools
Thinking tools, in increasing order of complexity and utility: Freeform text (Pen and Paper) Paper & Diagram Techniques (Three Column Technique, IBIS, Systems Thinking) Dedicated software programs (Compendium)
12 Places to Intervene in a System →
Excellent article, but requires some knowledge of “Systems Thinking” (The Fifth Discipline)
January 2008
28 posts
Wizzard.tv iPhone Podcatcher →
iPhone users - really neat podcatcher. I’m psyched :)
Issuu →
Neat little gadget - lets you publish animated, embeddable magazines.
Mindhabits.com
I like to call this site the ‘smile game’. They claim to be backed by years of research, and frankly, I believe it. I’ve been playing the Matrix game - very simple idea, seems too simple really - they present you with a grid of faces. Some are smiling, some neutral, and some frowning. Your job is to click the smiling faces. Tiles shuffle, time runs out, and all-in-all they...
Guide to Arguing Less and Saving More
I imagine I could write a neat book about this topic.
Content Recommendation Engine
Believe it or not, it already exists. It’s funny what you’ll find when you go looking.
Idea - build a recommendation engine for FLOW
If FLOW takes off, perhaps I should build a recommendation engine. Hmm.. I wonder if one already exists for Drupal?
iTunes Rental and Mean Girls
For Tara’s birthday, we rented Mean Girls from the iTunes store. The movie was actually pretty good, and the iTunes rental experience was also very good. I was disappointed when trying to search for rental videos, because I had trouble browsing rental videos by genre. Once we decided on a film, however, it was quick to buy, and we watched as it downloaded.
Needs - FLOW site
I could really use a nice embedded document viewer for drupal. Scribd would be a perfect solution if I can keep the documents private, and upload them from within our site.
Programming Practice
I’ve been asking myself, “what do I want to build?” for a long time. Thing is, this question is not motivating. Essentially, it puts the cart before the horse in my mind. Rather than asking “what should I build?”, which presupposes that I want/need to build something, I want to start out with a need, and then that need can drive the building process. The answer...
4 tags
IBIS & Compendium
I recently rediscovered Compendium. It’s such a wonderful brainstorming tool. The interface is pretty good, though I do find myself stumbling (particularly when it comes to zooming in and out). What’s really effective, however, is the IBIS techniques for brainstorming. I pick a problem I’m trying to resolve, and make a ‘Question’ node. I come up with some...
Idea
How about building a spaced repitition system into a browser plugin, so you can take vocabulary (etc) as your browsing and set it aside to learn.
National Museum of the American Indian →
Washington, DC
We’re waiting to board a plane to DC this morning. The lines weren’t too bad. It’ll be nice to see Tara’s brothers and parents.
MIT Course Picker
I saw the MIT course picker again today. It’s so refreshing to see such an easy-to-use, lightweight tool. Great job, Simile and David! Course Picker
Embedded Web-applications
Something big is happening. I stumbled across OpenSam this morning, and then later on received a message from Kaltura that they were working on Wikimedia integration. What’s so cool about this? We are departing from developing monolithic, separate applications. This means that developers can work at yet a higher level of abstraction when designing web sites. What’s better than...
Experimenting with "Collective Intelligence" book
Been rewriting some examples from this book in Ruby. It’s pretty fun. The code snippets from the book are not as clean as I’d like; but overall it’s good to help me think about recommender systems, etc. Good book.
Synergy
I had a crazy day today - full of meetings, no breaks. I had one meeting where we discussed possibilities that are very interesting and exciting for my career. I’m not sure it’ll go anywhere, but the synergy was eery - I got so excited, it sent shivers down my spine. I think that’s a first for me.
Cherries, almonds, cottage cheese
Doesn’t that sound like an awesome breakfast??
Ideas - What Color is Your Parachute Site
WCIYP has loads of exercises to help you figure out just what you want to do with your life. A lot of the techniques could easily be turned into a web app, and a potentially life- changing one at that!
Career - degrees
I’m considering:
Masters of Information Science
Management of Information Systems
MBA
…
iPhone Update
Just got the new iPhone update. I’m psyched to try out the new features!
Elgg + Jumpcut vs. Ning
Well, it was a nice idea to try to use Elgg for the Chinese social networking site. However, having tried out Ning’s video uploader (which works _great_), I’m afraid that Elgg is not the right solution for this task. Ning will handle everything we need, and will work much better.
Jumpcut
Had some trouble with the Jumpcut uploader (it consistently failed, no error messages, nothing) on a quicktime movie I made with iShowU. However, it handles privacy just as I was hoping. Security through obscurity - not the best security, but works nicely when trying to integrate services that don’t know each other’s users/groups. Here’s my current plan: Have students upload...
Jumpcut
I’d forgotten about Jumpcut. That site generated a lot of buzz a while back, I remember. I’m going to check it out too.
Private Video Test
Vimeo handles privacy through external, embedded videos nicely. I wish there were some way to share users/groups from Elgg; maintaining separate login information from Elgg and Vimeo will be annoying.
Easy way to privately embed videos in Elgg
For a Chinese Professor here, I’m researching an easy way to embed videos in Elgg without exposing them publicly. Some possible tools are Vimeo, and Viddler.
Watching MacWorld Keynote
I was actually able to watch some of the keynote, streaming, from http://www.iphonealley.com/news/macworld-2008-keynote-live-video-stream before my network connection was reset. Looks like some exciting new stuff from Apple.