Monthly Archives: June 2007

BlogLog: Coding Horror

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When I inaugurated this thread (which I didn’t realize I was doing, but I think I like it…), I mentioned Strange Maps, a blog I’d been reading for a little while.Tonight it’s one I just stumbled across, but all three recent posts are thoughtful, thorough, illustrated, and most importantly, interesting.

Coding Horror: programming and human factors by Jeff Atwood

For futureproofing, here are four that specifically caught me eye and put the feed in my freshly-upgraded NetNewsWire:

I’m sure there are plenty more…

Apple Quick Look and Information Engineering

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I caught the coverage of Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) a little after the fact. I wasn’t quite as underwhelmed as a lot of people. But something led me tonight to look again at their new Quick Look feature for the next release of Mac OS X.

I haven’t totally absorbed what Quick Look promises, but in a nutshell, it makes it easier in general to use files. (“Opening Files is so 2006″) You don’t need to fire up a video player to see a video, or open Preview (or heaven forbid, Acrobat) to read a PDF. This is a system-level service, so other applications can make use of it. At least, it works for iChat theater, as Life Hacker reports. It’s like WebEx, with no advance set-up. And glossier.

But what I was thinking about when I started this post was the congruence with the UI advances I posted about recently. The mouseover previews that are provided by Snap Shots and the Wikipedia definitely represent a fine tuning of the way we manage information on a screen. Books were pretty simple, and besides, we’ve had a long time to get used to those.

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The Mass Affluent and the Butler Shortage: crack(pot) economic analysis

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I had been bouncing around this idea—and trust me, it’s just a wild hare. I was wondering if there was anything interesting to make of the continuing growth in the number of millionaires in the US. There are over 9 million American households with a net worth of over $1M USD, and over one million above the $5M mark.

I’m not qualified to get into the serious economics here, although I just spent a nice little time seeing if I could find any prior commentary on the idea. I was wondering what cultural trends might correlate with the fact that a lot of the kinds of people who are getting rich these days are of a different ilk than the Barons of Industry of the 19th century.

Anyway, I learned that there’s a term, “mass affluent,” which might be a good google-start next time I chase this bunny, but the CNN/Money.com story from a couple of years ago is mostly concerned with the problem of marketing to these folks. Not really what I was looking for.

I also re-encountered Swivel, the YouTube for data, which I forgot to explore the last time I heard about it. I have to finish writing before I go get lost over there!

But there’s obviously something afoot, because last night on the Colbert Premium Report, I learned that there is a butler shortage–something NPR reported months ago but which seems to have been resuscitated by the media in the last week with a flurry of coverage.

CNN on the brink of self-awareness

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Jon Stewart took on the whole Paris-Hilton-goes-to-jail thing on the Daily Show tonight. What was most striking to me was the number of different clips he stitched together of people from CNN saying, basically, “I know we really should be embarassed to be treating this Paris Hilton thing as if it’s really news, but…”

Now, since the clips are out of context, perhaps most of them were disclaiming a brief mention and really didn’t treat it much as if it were news. But he did have a clip where they cut an interview short so they could follow live Paris riding off in the black-and-white.

I just wonder if there’s some glimmer of hope… could it be, if CNN hosts are acknowledging that maybe they shouldn’t be giving the Paris Hilton thing coverage… could they maybe, next time, just not do it?

Here’s the video, “expires July 12, 2007″:

Everything Old is New Again

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If you’re reading this, then you’ve found the new installation of my blog. I finally decided to modernize the infrastructure that runs Through the Wire and opted to install WordPress 2.2 on a DreamHost account. I’ve been impressed at the rate of WordPress development, and have found getting it installed and set up to be extremely easy and straightforward. I’ve tried to set up for clean redirects of all the old links, and will keep try to an eye on the logs for anything I missed.

What I’m most excited about is the chance to restore commenting. Honestly, I’m not writing this stuff just to hear myself talk. I had to turn off comments on the old blog because the spam was such a horrible drag. WordPress has free (for personal use) anti-spam services from Akismet and right now I have it set up to require simple registration too. So we’ll see how that goes, but let me encourage anyone who feels like shooting his or her mouth off (in an engaged and constructive fashion) to go right ahead.

Where should the metadata go?

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Sometimes I come late to the game. It wasn’t until Google’s acquisition of Feedburner was announced that I realized that those guys are right here in Chicago. But more to the point of the moment, they released an API for “pimping your feed” more than a year ago.

FeedBurner is interesting technology, but I never felt like I have enough traffic on this blog that integrating with their service would give me much in the way of interesting statistics. It seemed like an unnecessary extra layer when my blog already creates feeds.

The other thing they offer, which I’ve seen but hadn’t really known by name, are FeedFlares. These Feedflares are what add links in to an aggregator to add a post to Delicious, Facebook or Digg, or to email the post, etc. They also offer an API for publishing your own flares that other people could plug in to their generated feed.

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I am merely a number

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Charter Member #850 of the Long Now Foundation, as a matter of fact.
One of the member benefits is admission to a special showing of Brian Eno’s new exhibition, 77 Million Paintings. I am happy that I will be in St. Thomas at my friend Rob’s wedding on that day, but I would dearly love to attend the event. (For all this “Long Now” noise, the exhibit is only up for three days!) If the admission is transferrable, I would gladly share it with someone who can go.
A lot of my heroes are involved in this organization. Check it out.

The Semantics Web

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Tonight I came across a blog posting entitled
The Emerging-Semantics Web. The author, Mor Naaman, writes

There is no way that we can engage the masses in annotating media with “semantic” labels. At best, we can get the people to annotate content (such as Flickr images or YouTube videos) with short text descriptions or tags. This works only because tags are simple; powerful (can be used for many tasks) and, in some systems, carefully engineered to match the user’s natural motivations. Our best hope is to be able to take this bottoms-up annotation, or folksonomy if you will, and try to assign some semantics to it later….

There’s a lot to his blog post that taps into more theoretical questions—after all, he declared the Semantic Web “dead” in front of a conference panel entitled “Multimedia Metadata Standards in a Semantic Web 3.0″—but I’m not really going to try to get into that. The quote taps directly into an idea that has been rattling around in my head for a few days.

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