Posts from — November 2003

From users to programmers. A few months ago Steven Garrity's blog was host to an interesting conversation on the gap between user and programmer.
I hope the computer environments of the future will enable ordinary
people to just “get things done” without encountering steep learning
curves, even when that involves choregraphing
the work of several applications. The growing adoption of scripting languages and availability of open interfaces
to services suggests things might indeed be evolving in that direction.

Reading through the discussion reminded me of Python inventor Guido van Rossum's currently-limboed

Computer Programming for Everybody initiative, and of Tomasso Toffoli's vision of the knowledge home. Alan Kay comes to mind, too.

The information objects we are manipulating, while they are meaningful in and of themselves, ought to become things that
have a more powerful and easily learnable interface than “view/save”. We're
stuck with trinkets that are nice to look at, but hard to combine in
new ways. We need tinkertoys and Mindstorms. In the information routing arena, this is the kind of direction I was getting at with that feed algebra idea.
[Seb's Open Research]

Pooping on O'Reilley. Triumph the Insult Comic Dog appears on Fresh
Air with Terry Gross and does a superb take-off on Bill O'Reilley's recent
meltdown on the same show. [Interesting Times]

Social software collectibles. Ross Mayfield offers a Social Software Reader. Thanks for putting this together, Ross!

Assembling these kinds of lists is a low-cost way of adding value (and
providing extra exposure) to older pieces of writing. I should do that
too at some point.

Here are a few of my favorite picks in Ross's list:

• Stowe Boyd: Are you ready for Social Software
• GBN/Shirky: Social Software and the Next Big Phase of the Internet
• Lee Bryant: Smarter, Simpler, Social
• SocialSoftware on Meatball Wiki

[Seb's Open Research]

Today I am. 1. Re-reading Eric Laurier and Chris Philo 's X-morphising: review essay of Bruno Latour‰¥ús “Aramis, or the Love of Technology”. Excellent stuff.

2. Reading Susan Newman's Here, There, and Nowhere At All: Distribution, negotiation, and virtuality in postmodern ethnography and engineering – found via Lucy Suchman's brilliant Sociality of Information Technologies course at Lancaster.

3. Going out for dinner with the fascinating fabulous Joey Berzowska – who will be lecturing on Wearable Technology and Soft Computation at the NRC tomorrow morning.

Also looking forward to meeting speaking more with Steve Marsh – who leads the Socially Adept Technology and Advanced Collaborative Environments research programmes at the NRC-IIT.

More later. [Purse Lip Square Jaw]

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just logging these for research

Let's wrap it up. Star presenter wears hijab and apparently gets “a flood of calls”. But, in an odd turn for the BBC, the piece doesn't say what those calls think. Are they all praising the traditional – and controversial – head-dress, or are they up in arms. The story skirts the issue. Islam 101 explains a bit about it. [MetaFilter]

copenhagen pics i still have to update them

This is just to let you all know, the Apple Music Store now has Utah Philips, but you really need to go to his page linked above to get the real thing…. btw that also means they have Ani for those so inclined.

You are Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari! That's
right! You're two people! Actually, you're
probably a lot more than that, because you
argued that all of us are, fundamentally,
schizophrenics. Your notion of the rhizome is
far too popular amoung people who fantasize
about digital technology. You are, however,
both dead.

What 20th Century Theorist are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

Conference Management. The Public Knowledge Project Open Conference System. This is very very good, and I wish I had it when I ran MelbourneDAC. There I used Movable Type to maintain the conference website (eventually) and START as the online academic paper… [Vlog 2.1]

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I'm still waiting for someone to actually use it for a large conference.

At the Banff Centre.

At the start of the “Leading Innovation” programme….it seems a bit surreal to be here, and to plunge into what promises to be a wonderful week of learning.

The programme is using Leonardo da Vinci's life and work as a metaphoric container and framework…more on that tomorrow.  It's very cool, but I am tired.

In the meantime, I saw this on a wall here:

I met a person who had a dollar

We exchanged dollars

I still had a dollar

I met a person who had an idea

We exchanged ideas

Now we both had two ideas

[wirearchy News]