Tuesday, February 27, 2007

 

Real World URLs

This IT Conversations podcast has Ben Nolan describing how Zopto technology encodes real world addresses as URLs, like this:

The BBQ King Restaurant at 187 Queen Street, Auckland Central, Auckland, NZ is represented as:

http://www.zoomin.co.nz/nz/auckland/auckland+central/queen+street/187/-bbq+king+restaurant/

This is cool because it is both human and machine readable. Moreover, the URL has human meaning. I don't even have to click on the link to know where the restaurant is, I just have to read the URL.

Monday, February 26, 2007

 

Brainstorming Backfires

The Next Big Thing blog points to a interesting report on research showing that meetings make us dumber.

 

Quintura

John Battelle's blog points to a cool new search engine called Quintura. Search results come up as a "tag cloud." When you mouse over one of the "tags" the search results on the right are modified according to relevance.

 

Games Creating Games!

The Terra Nova Blog pointed me to an interesting site -- The Restaurant Game.
The Restaurant Game is a research project at the MIT Media Lab that will algorithmically combine the gameplay experiences of thousands of players to create a new game. In a few months, we will apply machine learning algorithms to data collected through the multiplayer Restaurant Game, and produce a new single-player game that we will enter into the 2008 Independent Games Festival. Everyone who plays The Restaurant Game will be credited as a Game Designer. It's never been easier to earn Game Designer credentials!

Friday, February 23, 2007

 

Think Fridays

The Endless Innovation blog pointed me to a Computer World article that cites an innovative business practice at IBM:
On Jan. 1, IBM rolled out companywide "ThinkFridays," a block of Friday afternoon time free of nonessential meetings and interruptions. (Workers in the U.S. also try to honor ThinkFridays overseas.) IBM programmers, who are spread across three continents, started using ThinkFridays a year ago to research new technologies or work on papers or patents, says Tim Donofrio, an IBM vice president. He says it's "a mental break from the endless phone calls, e-mail and instant messages," enabling employees to get done at least some of the work that tends to get pushed into nights or weekends.

Thursday, February 22, 2007

 

Wikipedia is #3

Leeann Prescott of Hitwise reports that the (English) Wikipedia is the number #3 most frequented website downstream from (US) Google. Google Images is #1 and Myspace is #2.

In addition 50% of all of the (English) Wikipedia traffic comes from (US) Google.

That is a convergence of Internet proportions!

Tuesday, February 13, 2007

 

Capture That Thought!

Today, I received two recommendations to try out some cool software from a couple of very bright people I admire (thx John and Leslie). The first is a (free) image manipulation application from Xerox PARC called
It is good for post processing things like digital photographs of hand drawn/written notes from whiteboards or paper.

The second is (an open source) thought-mapping application from SourceForge called:
This is good for disentangling complicated problems / solutions / processes / ideas.

Thursday, February 08, 2007

 

Politicopia

Here is a cool use of wiki technology: Politicopia. It is a site, run by an elected representative, that posts bills currently before the Utah State Legislature and allows citizens to summarize, comment, and even offer re-writes of the bills. Talk about participatory democracy!

It is based on Social Text software.

Wednesday, February 07, 2007

 

Second Life Debates

Here are links to a fascinating three-way debate about Second Life:

Starts with this (10 Jan 07):

Continues with these (29 Jan 07):

And still continues with these (06 Feb 07):

And these are not the end!

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My Wiki Spaces

Just created a free wiki over at wikispaces. You can check my attempt by clicking on this badge:

Wikispaces

It is free to me because they put google ads along the right side of my pages. Wikispaces is simple enough to get going immediately, but also allows for customization (CSS, etc.).

In order to leave a comment on the discussion pages, one must "join" wikispace.

It also seems to have some integration with Blogger, but I didn't try it out yet.

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