I have a few things on the margins of the front page of my blog intended to draw interest to other sites I find cool on the web, but here’s one that deserves its own call-out: “strange maps”
Going through its feed today for the first time in rather a while, I wanted to [...]
Through the Wire
"Hey, I'm just happy to be here…"
May 31st, 2007
Interested in Interestingness
Joe in Uncategorized
Brian Smith, professor at Penn State, blogged about some work that Anurag, one of his graduate students is doing with scanning large media sets for “interestingness”:
Why I’m jazzed about this. I’m into the idea of using computing for experience capture, but the retrieval process will always be hard if mere mortals have to [...]
May 29th, 2007
Social Bookmarking and Machine Tags
So my drive back from Cleveland yesterday was a great sunny-window-down-jamming-Sly-very-loudly-getting-a-sunburn-on-my-left-forearm kind of drive which gave me plenty of time to think about stuff. Alas, I didn’t have any strategy for taking notes or anything, but I got started writing some of this out last night. I ended up lapping myself with [...]
May 29th, 2007
Situatable Software Already?
Joe in Uncategorized
In my last post, I mentioned the idea of “situatable software” as a future direction related to Clay Shirky’s idea of “situated software.”
Well, to be honest I’m still not sure if the concept of “situatable software” is even a keeper, but since it’s in the air, I’m wondering if it has some intersection with the [...]
May 29th, 2007
No Wonder People Are Confused about DRM
A couple of weeks ago, I was disappointed by the media coverage about Amazon’s entry into digital music sales. The New York Times wrote: “Apple plans to start selling EMI’s songs as MP3 format later this month.” This is not true. AppleAAPL plans to start selling EMI’s songs without FairPlay DRM. [...]
May 25th, 2007
Times Change, People Change
In a 2004 essay called “Situated Software”, Clay Shirky wrote:
In the US today, if you are under 35 or make over 35,000 dollars a year, you are probably online, and if both of those things are true, then most of the people you know are probably online as well. You can now launch [...]
May 24th, 2007
The Aboutness of a Page
So earlier I had noted how my mention of O’Reilly’s “Hacks” books played into the bigger question of whether in my writing I specifically wanted to link mentions of those books to O’Reilly’s pages or whether I (and you, dear reader, the intended beneficiary of all these musings!) would be better served by marking [...]
May 23rd, 2007
Hacks Hacks
I was just having a chat with one of my teammates about O’Reilly’s “Hacks” books. I want to like these books — I love the idea of hacking; I love the idea that their coverage spans from SQL Hacks to Tivo Hacks to Statistics Hacks to Mind Hacks…
But the execution has never yet seem [...]
May 22nd, 2007
More on What Links Mean
So my previous post got a bit into the idea of what we mean when we make links in text. This is something I’ve thought about a lot, although I’m sure there are people who’ve thought about it a lot more.
I do think this example I just encountered, in the Wikipedia page on Yeats’ [...]
May 13th, 2007
Snap Shots
So I’ve had this long-running thought-thread about what we “mean” when we make certain kinds of links in a web page. In some cases, you are quite specifically trying to send someone to a destination. However, there’s another sense in which your intention is more to clarify/elaborate/disambiguate the linked text. For example, [...]