Archive for June, 2005
My life in bookmarks.
Wednesday, June 29th, 2005Analyzing what Bono wore to court
Wednesday, June 29th, 2005Looking at the picture on the left, its clear that even mega stars still have to dress like lawyers when in court, even if they aren't the defendant.
Bono is sporting a sharkskin-like rock star suit and for someone who has not been seen without sunglasses since 1982 he tones down the effect, with a pair that actually cover a minority of his face and are somewhat translucent.
An outfit that conveys the idea to the judge: 'you know all the leather and stuff is just a costume, I normally relax in a 2-piece, I'm really one of you. I may be a rebel, but I respect the law'.
Conveys to everyone else: 'I'm not a square, you know, look at my suit, its shiny, I look a bit like Robert Palmer, I'll wear what I want, like when I modified my school uniform and my Mum grounded me.'
What's strange about courts is that although people tolerate the theatrical on stage (I'm sure that when Bono appeals to the world at Live8, for example, he'll be wearing trademark compound-eye specs, wife beater and one-bollock leather trousers) the same people, when judge or jury, want the makeup removed.
And all this is because Bono is in court to get back a pair of black pants, earrings, sweatshirt and stetson hat that he says were stolen from him.
Perhaps Bono only has two outfits and someone stole the rock star one leaving him with the suit
link »
tags: [postmodern]
The impossible logic of copyright in the digital age
Monday, June 27th, 2005One of the problems that I have with the current Supreme Court ruling over file sharing is the assumption that this stuff can be legislated absolutely.
As media is reduced to an atomic state of bits, it starts to show quantum-like uncertainty, is it a thing like an LP or a transmission like a song on the radio, a particle or a wave?
Hidden within the Supreme Court ruling is the other side of the coin:
Just as people have created software that allows people to share things they don’t own, with copy protected digital media nobody owns anything. Everything you buy is actually rented.
Why is it legal to develop software which necessarily prevents ownership of something you buy?
At the moment I buy albums in flea markets for 10c a song, read books that I bought in the UK in the US and can read all the books I want by checking them out of the library.
I cannot buy second hand MP3s, watch DVDs I bought in the UK (without hardware that will surely be banned at some point) or check out unlimited electronic books from the library.
The bottom line to all this: stuff should just be a whole lot cheaper and the problem would surely go away.
The role of the media industry has always been to promote and distribute media - when the network replaces these what is that role?
Internet Gambling site is worth more than British Airways after today's IPO
Monday, June 27th, 2005Iran goes the way of Algeria
Friday, June 24th, 2005Microsoft builds future corporate strategy around Photoshop plug-in…
Friday, June 24th, 2005… OK not quite, but this news below does seem like a parody from the Onion:
“As previously reported, Microsoft is also proposing extensions to the RSS specification that will add support for ordered lists. That would enable, for example, e-commerce sites to more easily publish things such as a constantly updated feed of best-selling products.”
Do they mean extensions to the RSS spec, or an RSS module? Since what is being described can be done with a module, it would be crazy to change the spec.
And if all Microsoft is doing is writing an RSS module, then Jeez, their PR machine needs to understand that this is not a big deal.
You can already publish things such as a constantly updated feed of best selling products in RSS, the problem is not with the standard but the aggregators - no aggregator will display metadata from RSS modules on-the-fly.
Crap ads no. 38, the Volvo XC90
Friday, June 24th, 2005This ad for a V8 engined Volvo which does less than 20 miles per gallon featured alongside a Reuters story with the headline "Oil touches $60, U.S. demand steams ahead - in V8 Volvos perhaps.
Volvo's moronic advertising goes one step further, the strapline is 'it's the best V8 for the planet', a bit like a low tar cigarette describing itself as the best for your lungs.
At Moreover, someone once sent in a screenshot of a tourist website for Northern Ireland with a robot fed news headline saying 'Iron bar gang beats up overseas visitors'.
Thinking of collecting examples of this kind of advertising juxtaposition which occurs on the web because content and ads are matched without human approval.
link »
tags: [environment]
russtaglibro
Thursday, June 23rd, 2005Weird sewer fishing machine in lower Manhattan
Wednesday, June 22nd, 2005The guy pictured was outside my door this morning with a bizarre looking Rube Goldberg (Heath Robinson) contraption.
Apparently the machine is designed for 'sewer fishing'. According to its owner "these covers lead to drains that go way down, there's stuff from the 17th century down there". Eeeew.
link »
tags: [weird]
about me & projects
RSSOne line bio »
I'm an architect who became an Internet entrepreneur, where my day to day expertise is product design and UX: founder Curations; co founder Yelp; co founder: Moreover; co founder: Origins Network; architect Foster and partners; co creator the RSS 1.0 Standard
Projects »
Swiss Designed
Based in Geneva and working in Europe and the US, I currently advise companies and startups on Internet strategy. My primary area of expertise is defining new products and design of existing ones, with a focus not so much on what you see (website graphic design) but how products work and the business strategy that defines them.
Siderian Ventures
Venture partner at Siderian Ventures, seed investors in sustainable businesses.
Wists
(Massive caveat - I'm an architect but I can't lay bricks. Similarly, I'm a UX guy but built Wists, largely myself, to learn to program. It's old, pre-Ajax, and it sucks UX wise, it's a mess because I had to switch off half the functionality to make it scale - so it's as if I'd built a brick wall myself, rather than just draw it - but the design concept was sound and people still use it. However, Pinterest have built a visual bookmarking system largely as I would have designed it!)
Wists was the first service to develop the concept of visual social bookmarking that has become popular with Pinterest and Tumblr. Launched around the same time as Delicious, the difference was that each bookmark automatically created a thumbnail from a image of your choice on the page you were bookmarking. The idea is that you could create a wishlist of things you might want to buy, not tied to any particular service, such as Amazon.
Yelp
I helped co-found the incubator MRL Ventures, led by PayPal founder, Max Levchin. My remit was 'local' and when we realized how big the Yellow Pages market was and how bad these services were online, the opportunity seemed pretty simple. I was involved in the early days of Yelp and chose the name, among other things, but left the incubator to go to New York before it was spun out as a separate company.
Moreover.com
Moreover was the first Internet news search engine, powering Altavista, Yahoo, MSN and sites like the Economist. After Altavista received tons of traffic to its Moreover powered news during 911, Google decided to create Google News. I founded it with Angus Bankes and Nick Denton (who went on to create Gawker Media). We sold it to Verisgn. My favorite application created at Moreover was Newsblogger, which we did with Evan Williams who later went on to do Twitter.
Origins.net
The British and Irish genealogy service, Origins was the first website to provide access to UK government data. It was profitable within its first year of operation and is still going strong.
RSS 1.0
The history of RSS is somewhat arcane and often misundestood, suffice to say its not so much a standard but a meme and that Dave Winer deserves most of the credit. The main contribution from RSS 1.0 was the idea of modularity.
RSS Ping
RSS ping is a standard I developed with Wordpress creator, Matt Mullenweg, that never really took off but the concepts apply to what's now called the Realtime Web, the idea was to extend weblog ping mechanisms to say adding information about exactly what has been updated or published.
One Line Bio: personal headlines, RSS for people
Many of the most useful innovations on the web such as permalinks or the reverse chronological list have been seemingly trivial. with one line bios I tried to create the equivalent of news headlines for people, so that they could be simply disambiguated (John Doe, car mechanic, Michigan is different from John Doe, Lion Tamer, Nebraska). Today they are used by more than 500 million people after Six Apart then Twitter and the Facebook adopted this trivial, but still necessary step in web conventions. Anil Dash did a nice write up of one line bio's, here.
"Should architects design buildings as if they were Web apps?"
ZDNet
"The Original Gangsters of the Blogosphere"
ZDNet
"Like Shopping? Social Networking? Try Social Shopping"
New York Times, Wists
"it isn’t just Etsy that is trying to innovate. Wists allows users to bookmark pages visually"
Wall Street Journal, Wists
"Online Retailers Can’t Wait to Snare Shoppers"
Washington Post, Wists
"Combining elements of Flickr and Del.icio.us"
The Sunday Times, Wists
"Buying a Castle with Wists"
The Guardian, Wists
"Track Clickerati’s new buzz"
Financial Times, Wists
"If you’re looking for really wild ideas, check out www.cribcandy.com
Evening Standard, Cribcandy
"Better picture quality takes online TV to the next level"
The Observer, Smashing Telly
"Around San Francisco, that mecca of art and technology, Oobject has become a favorite gadgety diversion–and inspiration"
CNET, Oobject
"beats the endless stream of reality TV shows"
UK Guardian, Smashing Telly
“Next Big Trend: Social Shopping?”
San Francisco Chronicle, Wists
4 Trends for the Digital Age - Lift, Geneva
The Semantic Web - SXSW, Austin
Revolutionary Search Technologies - SXSW, Austin
The Post Spider World - O'Reilly P2P, San Francisco
Using XML for News Aggregation & Delivery - WWW conference, Amsterdam
Microcontent - SXSW, Austin
Working Out of the Box
What mistakes to Avoid in Web 2.0 (I was so wrong - cringeworthy)
Entropy and matrix balancing
A Systems Language
About me
Anti-Gaia
Cellular automata
Copenhagen (notes on others)
Crackpot ideas
cv
Designing Buildings Using Choreography
Digital Darwinism
Dirac Large Numbers Hypothesis
Emperor’s New Clothes
Entropy
Entropy at Large Scales
Entropy timeline
Evolution
Feel What Its Like to Be Someone Else Paradox
Fractal Universe
Game types and info theory (notes on others)
General Chaos Theory Notes
General notes
Gravitational Lensing Question
Gravity (notes on others)
harddriveonthemoon
How Human Beings Work
image_crop_test
Information and Evolution
Information equation of state for universe
Information sync vs. information transfer (my notes)
Kauffman notes (notes on others)
kiloword for ipad
Lee Smolin’s hunch
Linking the theory of Maximum Entropy and Natural Selection
Many Faces of Entropy or Bayesian Statistical Mechanics (Notes)
Maynard Smith (RI discourse notes)
My Notes: Table of Contents
My Wists
Negative Mass notes
Particle-less universe (my notes)
Photon Space
Pinker (notes on TED talk on violence)
Projects
Quantum Mechanics for Dummies
questions
Reading List
Relative States and the Environment: Einselection, Envariance, Quantum Darwinism, and the Existential Interpretation (notes)
Riemann
Self Evolving CA (my notes)
Semantic problems concerning information
Shannon (notes on others)
Simple Explanations for Things
Stephen Webb: Out of This World (Notes)
Stuart Kauffman (notes on others)
Teleological Illusion (my notes)
The confusing world green building contruction
The Entropy Sign
Turbulence (James Reuther email)
What I’m looking at…
whoami
why people spend money
Wolfram (notes on others)
Venture partner at Siderian Ventures, seed investors in sustainable businesses.
Wists
(Massive caveat - I'm an architect but I can't lay bricks. Similarly, I'm a UX guy but built Wists, largely myself, to learn to program. It's old, pre-Ajax, and it sucks UX wise, it's a mess because I had to switch off half the functionality to make it scale - so it's as if I'd built a brick wall myself, rather than just draw it - but the design concept was sound and people still use it. However, Pinterest have built a visual bookmarking system largely as I would have designed it!)
Wists was the first service to develop the concept of visual social bookmarking that has become popular with Pinterest and Tumblr. Launched around the same time as Delicious, the difference was that each bookmark automatically created a thumbnail from a image of your choice on the page you were bookmarking. The idea is that you could create a wishlist of things you might want to buy, not tied to any particular service, such as Amazon.
Yelp
I helped co-found the incubator MRL Ventures, led by PayPal founder, Max Levchin. My remit was 'local' and when we realized how big the Yellow Pages market was and how bad these services were online, the opportunity seemed pretty simple. I was involved in the early days of Yelp and chose the name, among other things, but left the incubator to go to New York before it was spun out as a separate company.
Moreover.com
Moreover was the first Internet news search engine, powering Altavista, Yahoo, MSN and sites like the Economist. After Altavista received tons of traffic to its Moreover powered news during 911, Google decided to create Google News. I founded it with Angus Bankes and Nick Denton (who went on to create Gawker Media). We sold it to Verisgn. My favorite application created at Moreover was Newsblogger, which we did with Evan Williams who later went on to do Twitter.
Origins.net
The British and Irish genealogy service, Origins was the first website to provide access to UK government data. It was profitable within its first year of operation and is still going strong.
RSS 1.0
The history of RSS is somewhat arcane and often misundestood, suffice to say its not so much a standard but a meme and that Dave Winer deserves most of the credit. The main contribution from RSS 1.0 was the idea of modularity.
RSS Ping
RSS ping is a standard I developed with Wordpress creator, Matt Mullenweg, that never really took off but the concepts apply to what's now called the Realtime Web, the idea was to extend weblog ping mechanisms to say adding information about exactly what has been updated or published.
One Line Bio: personal headlines, RSS for people
Many of the most useful innovations on the web such as permalinks or the reverse chronological list have been seemingly trivial. with one line bios I tried to create the equivalent of news headlines for people, so that they could be simply disambiguated (John Doe, car mechanic, Michigan is different from John Doe, Lion Tamer, Nebraska). Today they are used by more than 500 million people after Six Apart then Twitter and the Facebook adopted this trivial, but still necessary step in web conventions. Anil Dash did a nice write up of one line bio's, here.
Press »
"Should architects design buildings as if they were Web apps?"
ZDNet
"The Original Gangsters of the Blogosphere"
ZDNet
"Like Shopping? Social Networking? Try Social Shopping"
New York Times, Wists
"it isn’t just Etsy that is trying to innovate. Wists allows users to bookmark pages visually"
Wall Street Journal, Wists
"Online Retailers Can’t Wait to Snare Shoppers"
Washington Post, Wists
"Combining elements of Flickr and Del.icio.us"
The Sunday Times, Wists
"Buying a Castle with Wists"
The Guardian, Wists
"Track Clickerati’s new buzz"
Financial Times, Wists
"If you’re looking for really wild ideas, check out www.cribcandy.com
Evening Standard, Cribcandy
"Better picture quality takes online TV to the next level"
The Observer, Smashing Telly
"Around San Francisco, that mecca of art and technology, Oobject has become a favorite gadgety diversion–and inspiration"
CNET, Oobject
"beats the endless stream of reality TV shows"
UK Guardian, Smashing Telly
“Next Big Trend: Social Shopping?”
San Francisco Chronicle, Wists
Conference Talks & Interviews »
4 Trends for the Digital Age - Lift, Geneva
The Semantic Web - SXSW, Austin
Revolutionary Search Technologies - SXSW, Austin
The Post Spider World - O'Reilly P2P, San Francisco
Using XML for News Aggregation & Delivery - WWW conference, Amsterdam
Microcontent - SXSW, Austin
Working Out of the Box
What mistakes to Avoid in Web 2.0 (I was so wrong - cringeworthy)
Hobby Projects »
Preserving the room where the web was invented
The invention of the web is arguably as significant as that of the printing press. But unlike Gutenberg's workshop it is intact. However, it is in danger of being forgotten (it's not even in the same country as the official plaque which commemorates it). after having corresponded with Tim Berners Lee to write down the history of what happened where, I have managed to help get it filmed and put onto on of the online mapping services. The next step is to try and preserve it.
Oobject
Oobject is a lists site, where each list is a series of pictures of man made objects. The aim is to be like a digital Wunderkammer, and in the spirit of such it supposed to be fun rather than too serious. Oobject may look like yet another, crappy, weird things site, but delve in, I’ve put an unhealthy amount of effort into it
Cribcandy
Cribcandy is a Wists powered product blog for architecture and interiors - it consists of visual bookmarks of the design items I look at every day, over breakfast.
Natural Selection as Information Theory
It seems incredible to me that the theory of Evolution by Natural Selection - something which potentially describes how laws themselves can emerge and therefore sits above them, is relegated to the relatively high level science of biology, rather than physics or mathematics. I think that looking at the problem in terms of computer science is the way to do this, and specifically its possible to show how any two systems self configure to transfer information between themselves, over time - how they learn. This is total crank territory, but if you are interested, this is what I spend a great deal of my spare time thinking about, and the heading above links to a summary. A friend at CERN, has figured out an ingenious way to test my crackpot theory there by firing a laser at two lab created atoms and measuring the precision of their energy states over time, to see if they increase.
Smashing Telly
Described best by Paul Kedrosky as an attempt to 'Tivo-ify the web', Smashing Telly was a blog which curated longer format Video available on sites like YouTube before there were things like Netflix on demand or Hulu and while it was difficult to find good stuff among the crap. It focused on primarily on documentaries although no longer updated, it's still worth a look for some of the more obscure stuff.
EDML - a standard for forms to build online forms
Before XML existed there was no way to create semantic markup in HTML, I sat down with my father for several months and tried to map the standards for Electronic Document Exchange (EDI) for purchase order and invoices and the like, to an HTML based standard.
The invention of the web is arguably as significant as that of the printing press. But unlike Gutenberg's workshop it is intact. However, it is in danger of being forgotten (it's not even in the same country as the official plaque which commemorates it). after having corresponded with Tim Berners Lee to write down the history of what happened where, I have managed to help get it filmed and put onto on of the online mapping services. The next step is to try and preserve it.
Oobject
Oobject is a lists site, where each list is a series of pictures of man made objects. The aim is to be like a digital Wunderkammer, and in the spirit of such it supposed to be fun rather than too serious. Oobject may look like yet another, crappy, weird things site, but delve in, I’ve put an unhealthy amount of effort into it
Cribcandy
Cribcandy is a Wists powered product blog for architecture and interiors - it consists of visual bookmarks of the design items I look at every day, over breakfast.
Natural Selection as Information Theory
It seems incredible to me that the theory of Evolution by Natural Selection - something which potentially describes how laws themselves can emerge and therefore sits above them, is relegated to the relatively high level science of biology, rather than physics or mathematics. I think that looking at the problem in terms of computer science is the way to do this, and specifically its possible to show how any two systems self configure to transfer information between themselves, over time - how they learn. This is total crank territory, but if you are interested, this is what I spend a great deal of my spare time thinking about, and the heading above links to a summary. A friend at CERN, has figured out an ingenious way to test my crackpot theory there by firing a laser at two lab created atoms and measuring the precision of their energy states over time, to see if they increase.
Smashing Telly
Described best by Paul Kedrosky as an attempt to 'Tivo-ify the web', Smashing Telly was a blog which curated longer format Video available on sites like YouTube before there were things like Netflix on demand or Hulu and while it was difficult to find good stuff among the crap. It focused on primarily on documentaries although no longer updated, it's still worth a look for some of the more obscure stuff.
EDML - a standard for forms to build online forms
Before XML existed there was no way to create semantic markup in HTML, I sat down with my father for several months and tried to map the standards for Electronic Document Exchange (EDI) for purchase order and invoices and the like, to an HTML based standard.
Notes »