Posts
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From the Classroom: Remixing Wikis with Rendezvous, Web Services and SchoolTool
From the Classroom: Remixing Wikis with Rendezvous, Web Services and SchoolTool
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From the Classroom: Phone as Platform: Lessons from ITP
The talk that Clay gave mentioned the hackability of cell phones as a platform. Good to hear in an environment like this. Having Python released is a step in the right direction, but I think for the most part people just laugh still when I talk about lowering the barrier for people to experiment with their phones. There are some great hacks that are showing up, but they’re the exception and relatively few and far between. It’s not enough to just have the ability to play with this stuff, it’s making it easy to do so. Lots of people with good ideas about how to make mobility more useful and pervasive currently ARE NOT working on mobility. They’re doing all the things that would be made more interesting by adding a mobile component. And they’re not going to take weeks to figure out how to write simple little shims to make their phone interact with everything else online. Lowering the barrier allows those people with ideas (instead of just time) to participate in evolving the medium.
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Folksonomy, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Mess
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Jimmy Wales from Wikipedia
ETech talk from the founder of Wikipedia. Wikipedia addresses the original dream of the internet: people sharing information. The early services worked well for a while. There were some problems though:
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Cory Doctorow
Down at Etech right now, Cory says that the notes from his talk are going to be up online after the conf. He’s talking about how creating an alternative email system that cuts out the abuses would ruin a lot of the applications built on and around email. But there are other systems (like DVD) that work in the restricted way by default. “Entrepreneurial organisms” compared to parasites, it’s pretty funny.
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ETech Ho!!!!
I’m heading down to ETech tomorrow for the day. I wanted to go to SXSW but didn’t get a chance to, and hadn’t made plans for ETech cause it seemed like things were too busy. But then Russ decided to go down just for the day, and said “Come on! One day…” Yea, what’s one day?* I haven’t been to an ETech before, and I hear they’re great. And there are other folks down there looking to start up their own versions of Mobile Monday in other places. It would be great to get a chance to meet up with them. And then Elle decided to go also, and convinced me it was worth going as well. So, two (Russ and Elle) and one (me). I can argue that I was outnumbered. We’ll be down there tomorrow, March 16th, probably causing some kinda ruckus in the hallways and lobby.
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Two RSS Articles at Small Business Trends
Two great bits of info about RSS over at Small Bussiness Trends: RSS and Marketing and Is 2005 the Year of RSS? I’m a big aggregator fan. Without my feedreader I would have a much harder time pulling together and sorting through the information I want. But I’m a geek, and I know there are tons of great reasons to be producing content as RSS that have nothing to do with information overload and trying to follow a fast moving industry. Here’s what was probably my favorite bit in there:
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Kraus Posts the JotSpot Long Tail Presentation
I went to see a presentation at SDForum’s Emerging Technology SIG just a little while after JotSpot launched. Joe Kraus spoke about the long tail of software development, and how trends like situated software pointed to there being room for lots of small applications with small groups of users. He compared the curve of potential number of applications to number of users for those applications with the curve of search queries to Excite and the number of people running them. I think everyone is familiar with the long tail analogy by now, but back then it was still sinking in for a lot of us. Lots of people look at me like I have two heads when I try to describe the fact that JotSpot is going after the long tail of software development - maybe I was describing it wrong. Now I have something else to point people to however, cause that presentation is now online. It’s probably a good viewpoint to read over for anyone doing web software development, no matter where you stand on the whole “long tail” theory.
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Paul Graham on Startups
I really enjoyed reading Paul Graham’s take on running a startup. It seems like almost everything I read online these days is either relatively short or I just don’t finish it. The stuff that Paul Graham writes tends to keep my attention all the way through however. Do I agree with everything in there? No. But it strikes me as a very honest evaluation of his experiences and a great glimpse into his reasoning. That’s all I think anyone can ever realistically expect. Of course the bits about prototyping and building your early versions for flexibility and agility are right up my alley. At the March 106Miles meeting there were a lot of questions about early stage valuation. Here’s how Graham answers that one:
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Hey, look at that! Another version of my feed.
No Need to Click Here - I’m just claiming my feed at Feedster
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