Posts
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Technorati
I went over to the Technorati Developers Salon on Wed, but I haven’t really had much time to sit down and write something since then. People have already posted much of the information from the event. In particular I point to the info from xian, an excellent three part post that seems to have come out in realtime:
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Back in the Land of the Geeking
After two and a half weeks on the road I’m finally back in California. Of course the best way to really feel that I’ve come back home is to get into something geeky. So I walked into the door to my apartment, downloaded a map to my Clie, took a shower, and zipped right off to the Technorati Developers Salon. I’ll have to make up a separate entry for that later on, it was a good session. On my way back I was standing at the BART station on 22nd and I saw another guy with a laptop bag, so I asked if he coming from the salon also. He wasn’t, but he knew what I was talking about, so we chatted for a bit while the train came. Ahh, to be back in the Bay Area, where discussions with random strangers can revolve around the future of the Technorati API. I know the dangers involved in being surrounded by people who already know what you’re talking about all the time. Especially as a business person, it’s dangerous to never hear the objections that a complete newbie has. When everyone else you run across knows the principles you’re building on, it’s much easier for them to accept your pitch and understand the value you’re presenting. But after a long period of full immersion in the biomass it is nice to have a couple of conversations that start at geeky and quickly get more abstract.
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R&D and The Innovation Curve
There’s a very interesting post about the correlation between R&D; spending and profitability. The post points to a great article at strategy+business. I don’t think the news that businesses are moving from a “closed” innovation cycle (all work done within the company) to an “open” innovation cycle (where ideas in particular are pulled from outside) is very surprising. The general movement towards business models where free agents play a large role certainly seems to fit together well with the shift. I do take issue with one bit however. It relates to the innovation effectiveness curve and this bit from the text:
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Steaming Load
I just posted about Sem@code, which I think rocks. Since I’ve said so much good, I feel somewhat justified in bringing up this article about RFID and cell phones. I can think of no appropriate words, except perhaps “steaming load of crap”. Take the quote from the article used in the post leader:
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Sem@code
The Sem@code project has released a demo for Symbian phones. I posted about it at the end of last year, and I still think it’s a great idea. I actually exchanged a few emails with Simon, trying to find out what he had planned for it. He’s interested in trying to make money off the idea, which is certainly a good idea. I was hoping he would be releasing the code under some kind of dual license model (ie. GPL for non-commercial use, like what MySQL has done), and that’s probably still possible. Interest in the project always helps of course, so this is my post to try to help out the project so that Simon can make some money off of it and hopefully make more of this excellent idea publicly available.
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Listening to Users Part III
TheFeature has Listening to Users, Part III posted. I really like this series of articles. My personal favorite quote from this one:
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Technorati Developers Salon Kickoff
Technorati is hosting a Developers Salon Kickoff in San Francisco on May 19th. Although it’s called a “developers salon”, it sounds more like an open invitation to both users and developers to come and talk to the team. I’m going cause it’s an interesting tool. I like Technorati, but I haven’t used any of the development interfaces yet. It’s normally a good move from the innovative technology standpoint as well. If you have a product or service that does something genuinely new, something that hasn’t been tried before, it’s good to take your developers and your users and partners, get them in the same room, and see what happens. The results can be quite surprising. So, I’m planning to go to observe the interaction as well.
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Social Networking, Social Engineering
I recently finished reading The Art of Deception, and I probably should have posted about it earlier. I’ve been involved with computer security for a while, and I’ve been to a bunch of the more popular security and hacker conferences, which is the reason I’m giving to myself for the book not making a strong impression immediately. The book is very good, it brings to light many aspects of computer security that even most experts don’t know about. This should be required reading for anyone involved in computer security. That’s why I picked it up myself, despite being familiar with many of the tactics and general principles from hanging out at DefCon year after year. So, I’ve gotten that out of the way, it’s a good book.
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We Be Schillin'
I’m about to leave for a two week business trip, so I’ve been running around all over the place. There hasn’t been time to read my normal round of feeds, let alone post anything of my own. Sorry about that, but I have to admit it might only get worse over the next few weeks. In the meantime I’ve been kicking around ideas about what kind of posts I should be putting up here when I do have some time to post again. I really liked doing the longer posts. Sure, they took longer, and sometimes didn’t work out too well, but they gave me a great chance to reflect deeply on a given topic and polish my writing skills somewhat. The shorter posts were normally just tidbits of info from sources I figured were either very interesting or significantly esoteric. The short bits encouraged me to broaden my reach some. Explore new sources so that I would have something interesting at the end of the day. But I also felt like I was just being a shill for the technology industry as a whole sometimes. And this blog is all about keeping it real. I even made up my own gang sign, cause I’m just that legit. So I think when I get back to it I’m gonna try for more of the commentary heavy posts. But all you kids out there in teevee land can lend a hand also. Drop me a line and tell me what you were into, or leave a comment, send a carrier pigeon, whatever. Just don’t tie a note to a brick and hurl it through my window, I hate it when people do that.
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How to Hack Your Head
I have to let my geekness shine and provide a pointer to How to Hack Your Head, an article by Steven Johnson. Steven wrote Interface Culture, a book I just recently read and was quite impressed by. His latest book, Mind Wide Open: Your Brian And The Neuroscience of Everyday Life, is currently high on my reading list. The article runs through some existing technologies you can use to get a peek into your brain functioning and mental state. From the sounds of it, direct neural computer interfaces seem to be quite a ways off. Even if you have a few million dollars. Awww man.
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