culture

Nov 15 2008   4:21PM GMT

g-speak: Oblong brings the “Minority Report” operating system to science reality

Posted by: Alexander Howard
operating systems, virtual, media, data, Technology, fun, video, Internet, multimedia, innovation, cool, culture, interesting, futurism, invention, creativity, entrepeneurship, interactive media, tool, buzz, science, virtual reality, interface, display, geek, demonstration, immersive 3D worlds

William Gibson noted recently that the cyberpunk fiction he’d been writing over the past quarter century has now become science fact. Pattern Recognition and Spook Country are both set in near-futures with technology and social norms that are only a slight extension of the complex technological realities of the present. The neural shunt that jacks you into the network he imagined in Neuromancer hasn’t quite have arrived yet but some humans now have direct brain-computer interfaces implanted in their brains.

Brad Feld appreciates this relationship between science fiction and fact as few others do. As he writes in ‘Science Fact‘ on Oblong’s web blog, the future of human-computer interaction is looking breathtaking. And, while the genetically-engineering precognitive humans Philip K. Dick imagined in “Minority Report” in 1956 haven’t arrived yet, g-speak certainly has.

g-speak is a spatial operating environment from Oblong Industries that combines a gestural interface, DLP projectors and ‘recombinant networking.” It’s modeled upon the virtual OS operated by Precrime Agent John Anderton in Minority Report, the film adaptation of Dick’s short story.

That connection is no accident. The science adviser that Spielberg consulted for the film, John Underkoffler, has been quietly busy since the film’s premiere in 2002. A few stories have popped up over the years, to be sure, but since Oblong Industries was founded in the research in 2006 he and other technologists have advanced the technology considerably, as you’ll see in the video below.

Once you’ve watched it, read g-speak in slices and about the origins of Oblong in the MIT Media Lab to learn about the potential for this human-to-machine interface and the long road to bringing it into reality..

g-speak overview 1828121108 from john underkoffler on Vimeo.

[Hat tip to Engadget's Josh Topolsky and Jamie.]

Embedded below is a 2007 report on g-speak featuring an interview with Underkoffler.

Oct 15 2008   9:00AM GMT

What is Blog Action Day? A chance to help fight global poverty.

Posted by: Alexander Howard
open source, small business, business, Web 2.0, media, Technology, Internet, useful, cool, culture, education, learning, free, academics, volunteer, green, event, entrepeneurship, resource, Development, tool, politics, blogging, buzz, science, communications

Blog Action Day is, according to its founders, “an annual nonprofit event that aims to unite the world’s bloggers, podcasters and videocasters, to post about the same issue on the same day.”

In 2007, the issue was the environment. In 2008, the theme is poverty.

By coordinating the efforts of many bloggers (more than 10,000 different sites, as of this morning), the organizers hope to galvanize improvement in the lots of the world’s poor. As measured by the World Bank, substantial improvements have been made since the 1980s.

Even so, one quarter of the world continues to subsist on less than $1.25/day.

Here’s what you can do to help:

• Participate in the One Laptop Per Child project (OLPC). Just head over to laptopgiving.org.
• Tune in to BlogTalkRadio’s 12-hour Blog Action Day talkathon to discover how dozens of prominent bloggers and technologists will be helping in the effort.
• Support microlending efforts at Kiva.org. Learn more about microcredit, Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank in this Business Week article, “Can Technology Eliminate Poverty?
• Read WebTeacher’s post describing a social business to find out how this form of concerned commerce works.
• Donate to or participate in the development of the technologies described at PracticalAction.org. These include micro-hydro plants, small-scale wind generators, affordable solar lanterns and biogas plants.
• Learn more in online poverty resources listed on BlogActionDay.org.

Spread the word!

Sep 5 2008   7:19AM GMT

Rapping about CERN’s Large Hadron Collider? Not the end of the world as we know it.

Posted by: Alexander Howard
Technology, fun, video, YouTube, cool, culture, learning, free, academics, MP3, futurism, music, science, humor, geek

Need a breath of fresh air and humor heading into the weekend? Check out this hilarious video of the Large Hadron Rap on YouTube. Hat tip to Cosmos Magazine for the discovery. This leads up to the highly anticipated moment next Wednesday when CERN turns on the Large Hadron Collider over in Geneva, Switzerland. Combining humor, science and music, this video brings some geeky fun to the exploration of the fundamental particles of matter, including our understanding of antimatter, dark matter and the elusive Higgs Boson.

According to the YouTube shownotes:

• Kate McAlpine, aka DJ AlpineKat, is the rapper. She works as a science writer for CERN.
• Will Barras, a PhD student in the Department of Linguistics and English Language at the University of Edinburgh, is responsible for the thumpin’ beats.
  
• The images used came from particlephysics.ac.uk, space.com, the Institute of Physics, NASA, Symmetry, and Marvel
• The dancers doubled as camera people, with some work by Neil Dixon. Stock footage is CERN’s.
• The original mp3, lyrics, and vocals can be sampled and remixed from McAlpine’s directory on MSU.edu.

Those lyrics are easily several orders of magnitude more complex than the average gangsta rap. Babes, bling and bluster is replaced by the Big Bang, dark matter and bosons. I posted them below for your enjoyment:

The Large Hadron Rap

Twenty-seven kilometers of tunnel under ground
Designed with mind to send protons around
A circle that crosses through Switzerland and France
Sixty nations contribute to scientific advance
Two beams of protons swing round, through the ring they ride
‘Til in the hearts of the detectors, they’re made to collide
And all that energy packed in such a tiny bit of room
Becomes mass, particles created from the vacuum
And then…

LHCb sees where the antimatter’s gone
ALICE looks at collisions of lead ions
CMS and ATLAS are two of a kind
They’re looking for whatever new particles they can find.
The LHC accelerates the protons and the lead
And the things that it discovers will rock you in the head.

We see asteroids and planets, stars galore
We know a black hole resides at each galaxy’s core
But even all that matter cannot explain
What holds all these stars together – something else remains
This dark matter interacts only through gravity
And how do you catch a particle there’s no way to see
Take it back to the conservation of energy
And the particles appear, clear as can be

You see particles flying, in jets they spray
But you notice there ain’t nothin’, goin’ the other way
You say, “My law has just been violated – it don’t make sense!
There’s gotta be another particle to make this balance.”
And it might be dark matter, and for first
Time we catch a glimpse of what must fill most of the known ‘Verse.
Because…

LHCb sees where the antimatter’s gone
ALICE looks at collisions of lead ions
CMS and ATLAS are two of a kind
They’re looking for whatever new particles they can find.

Antimatter is sort of like matter’s evil twin
Because except for charge and handedness of spin
They’re the same for a particle and its anti-self
But you can’t store an antiparticle on any shelf
Cuz when it meets its normal twin, they both annihilate
Matter turns to energy and then it dissipates

When matter is created from energy
Which is exactly what they’ll do in the LHC
You get matter and antimatter in equal parts
And they try to take that back to when the universe starts
The Big Bang – back when the matter all exploded
But the amount of antimatter was somehow eroded
Because when we look around we see that matter abounds
But antimatter’s nowhere to be found.
That’s why…

LHCb sees where the antimatter’s gone
ALICE looks at collisions of lead ions
CMS and ATLAS are two of a kind
They’re looking for whatever new particles they can find.
The LHC accelerates the protons and the lead
And the things that it discovers will rock you in the head.

The Higgs Boson – that’s the one that everybody talks about.
And it’s the one sure thing that this machine will sort out
If the Higgs exists, they ought to see it right away
And if it doesn’t, then the scientists will finally say
“There is no Higgs! We need new physics to account for why
Things have mass. Something in our Standard Model went awry.”

But the Higgs – I still haven’t said just what it does
They suppose that particles have mass because
There is this Higgs field that extends through all space
And some particles slow down while other particles race
Straight through like the photon – it has no mass
But something heavy like the top quark, it’s draggin’ its ***
And the Higgs is a boson that carries a force
And makes particles take orders from the field that is its source.
They’ll detect it….

LHCb sees where the antimatter’s gone
ALICE looks at collisions of lead ions
CMS and ATLAS are two of a kind
They’re looking for whatever new particles they can find.

Now some of you may think that gravity is strong
Cuz when you fall off your bicycle it don’t take long
Until you hit the earth, and you say, “Dang, that hurt!”
But if you think that force is powerful, you’re wrong.
You see, gravity – it’s weaker than Weak
And the reason why is something many scientists seek
They think about dimensions – we just live in three
But maybe there are some others that are too small to see
It’s into these dimensions that gravity extends
Which makes it seem weaker, here on our end.
And these dimensions are “rolled up” – curled so tight
That they don’t affect you in your day to day life
But if you were as tiny as a graviton
You could enter these dimensions and go wandering on
And they’d find you…

When LHCb sees where the antimatter’s gone
ALICE looks at collisions of lead ions
CMS and ATLAS are two of a kind
They’re looking for whatever new particles they can find.
The LHC accelerates the protons and the lead
And the things that it discovers will rock you in the head.

Aug 19 2008   12:42AM GMT

Bizzwords: Business lingo describes the state and style of the information age

Posted by: Alexander Howard
Google, Web 2.0, Technology, fun, Internet, commentary, cool, culture, college, crowdsourcing, futurism, exploration, WhatIs.com, creativity, Silicon Valley, wiki, conversation, widgets, social networking, blogging, humor, history, communications, buzzword, word meanings, languages, geek

Isn’t it amazing how the business lingo of the times reflects the technologies, anxieties and energies of a period? My local NPR station, WBUR, featured a terrific episode of On Point this past June, hosted by one Tom Ashbrook, that was all precisely this topic, discussing and poking gentle fun at business lingo. You can listen to it on Odeo or head over to the New Business Lingo at OnPointRadio.org.

[Image Credit: Despotes]

There are some wonderful “bizzwords” in the show, along with some historical perspective. As the show description notes:

Every walk of life has its lingo. Its buzzwords and catchphrases. American business has its own colorful menagerie of slang, and always has — from bulls and bears, to bootstraps, and 800-pound gorillas, and fish in a barrel.

But buzzwords and catchphrases change. They turn over and make way for newcomers.

And when they do, in American business, they may tell us something about where we and our economy are headed.

If you lived through the business world of the 80s, you no doubt encountered a consultant or executive who talked about “re-engineering business processes” or finding “synergies” between different products.

Cube farmers could be depended upon to be seen “prairie dogging” when something happened around the office. Networking at cocktail parties was hot.  Blamestormers might be Dilberted. Seagull managers might fly in to observe their microserfs, make a lot of noise, poop over everything and then leave.

If you worked in technology, you probably had a PC. As a hacker, you might have laughed about clueless users needed treeware. Everyone worried about career-limiting moves (CLMs) that might result from a bad click or command, propagating in an ohnosecond.

And of course, like, ya know, everything was, like, totally rad, dude.

In the 90s, couch potatoes turned to mouse potatoes as office workers all jumped on the Information Superhighway. Wired happily documented it all in its Jargon Watch column. By the end of the decade, i-everything and e-anything created one of the great tech bubbles.

Everyone wanted to go IPO. A few years later so one of the great crashes. Dotcommers became dotgoners and dotbombers. The 80/20 rule defined actionable moments after careful cost-benefit analyses. If something could be outsourced, it was. Viral marketing zipped off into email distribution lists, moving through word of mouse.

In the late ’00s (naughts), the Web 2.0 bubble has replaced the Internet bubble, as social networkers expand their social graphs, exposed to infotisements and advertorials as they blog, edit wikis and surf the blogosphere with RSS readers on iPhones. Online marketers are accountable for the ROI of every campaign. We’ve crowdsourced many actions and processes, whereever feasible, bending to the wisdom of the crowd and selling to the long tail.

Google is both a verb and a noun, along with nearly every conceivable form in between. Despite the company’s best efforts, google has even escaped proper noun status in many communities. The President calls it “the Google.”  The senior senator from Arizona talks about “a google.” The junior senator  from Illinois (and his search committee) Googled potential vice-presidential candidates. As billions of revenue from search adverstising each quarter streaming in to the Internet giant, it’s clear we’re a culture of Googlers googling each other, egosurfing away.

We’re also frazzing, dangerously close to overload by switching from email to cell phone to IM to text messages to meetings to Twitter and the Web.

Steeped in media from satellite and cable news networks, DVRs, DVD-players, on-demand programming and Web video, there’s even a danger of what sociologist Emile Durkheim might have identified as a kind of digital anomie, colorfully described as “Dorito Syndrome” — a persistent feeling of dissatisfaction and emptiness, regardless of consumption.

No matter how much screensucking you do, there’s always more. Lisa Belkin wrote about a number of these in the New York Times in 2006 in Overly Wired.

Widgets are everywhere now, of course, and may be anything from a small gadget to an embeddable module in an iGoogle page to a downloadable desktop application or even (gasp) an esoteric mechanical device. (Guinness drinkers have their own version, of course.)

The green computing wave spurred by skyrocketing energy costs from power-hungry data centers has spawned many biologically-themed terms.

Greenwashing, astroturfing and blacksurfing have all entered the lexicon. Every product seems to live in its own ecosystem.

Freemium business models now may promote coopetition between fierce competitors, perhaps using telepresence rooms that are far too expensive for standard percussive maintenance.

Under such conditions, “matadors” (people skilled at dodging assignments or responsibility) have little chance of scraping by, as the presence technologies, pervasive computing and “status message culture” adopted by the millenials puts “slacking” firmly into the lexicon of decades-past.

And, of course, we’re all increasingly computing in the cloud now.

As we near the end of this decade, the buzzwords of the ’10s have yet to be coined and collectively sampled, savored and entered into the lexicons maintained by Merriam-Webster, the Oxford Englsh Dictionary and, of course, the best online IT encyclopedia online. (Shameless plug).

Some will end up as sniglets, humorous oddities of cultures past. Other words will always remind the culture at large of a certain time and place.

Here’s hoping we can improve on vlog, blook and webinar.

If you have an idea of what lingo might define the next decade of business, let me know at ahoward@techtarget.com or leave a comment.

Jun 27 2008   8:42AM GMT

Have you got your avatar yet? Gartner says you will.

Posted by: Ivy Wigmore
business, Web 2.0, new media, multimedia, culture, futurism, participation, interactive media, social networking, virtual reality, gaming, immersive 3D worlds, virtual worlds, predictions

It’s 2008. Do you know where your avatar is?

Only three years to get your avatar unless you want to be lumped in with the bottom 20% — by 2011, Gartner says that the vast majority of Internet users will have avatars to represent them online in various gaming and non-game virtual environments. Which, I guess, are expected to proliferate. The clock’s ticking — Gartner predicted that last year at their Symposium/ITxpo 2007 Emerging Trends.

And they aren’t talking about the 2D image that pops up beside your posts in forums. I mean, even I have one of those. And she’s cute, if a little on the flat side. But she’s no Lara Croft — her ass-kicking ability is extremely limited. And I can’t see the world from her perspective, in a 3-D immersive world.

I have friends in virtual worlds, have had invitations extended — but so far, I haven’t wandered into one. I completely understand the appeal. Wow — talk about a rich fantasy life! My stock response, though, is that I don’t have time for my first life, let alone a second one.

I guess I’m going to have to make time. According to Gartner and near-futurists such as Gerri Sinclair, more and more of our online activities will move to virtual environments and our interactions will be conducted by 3D representatives with all the capabilities we and others possess in the real world — and then some. Sinclair is executive director of the master’s degree program for digital media at the Great Northern Way Campus in Vancouver and her students are creating a parallel virtual university.

Here’s an interview on MSDN’s Channel 10.

Apparently, the future of online interaction is going to be pretty much conducted by avatars, in 3-D surround everything. I was thinking about that — my worklife avatar would be plunked in front of a computer looking at a computer screen and my online leisure time avatar would best represent me by sitting around chatting in book store cafes. But then, I guess, “I” could wander over to the shelves and find something to read or go get some sprinkles on my latte…

Maybe it’s just a failure of imagination on my part. In a 3-D immersive world I can be and do — virtually — anything… Hmmm… Well, it looks like I’m going to get sprinkles on my latte. Then… on the way to the counter I feel inspired to… do a triple backflip. Hey! Perfectly executed — and not a drop spilled! Now I’m going to drink my coffee. For real.

~ Ivy Wigmore

Jun 15 2008   11:27AM GMT

What is Twitter? Is this distributed microblogging platform ready for the enterprise?

Posted by: Alexander Howard
messaging, Networking, wireless, small business, business, Mobile, applications, news, Web 2.0, enterprise, software, IT marketing, media, Technology, Web services, fun, video, new media, Internet, innovation, useful, aggregator, cool, culture, free, interesting, exploration, reviews, Silicon Valley, resource, collaboration, forum, wiki, conversation, community, social, interactive media, Web analytics, widgets, tool, tutorial, howto, trend, social networking, blogging, service, buzz, communications, Web applications, buzzword, word meanings, geek, conference, enterprise 2.0

Given that I’ve become an avid user of Twitter, I’m frequently asked what, exactly, Twitter is and what in the world it’s useful for.

Isn’t it just it a presence messaging on steroids? What about a free global SMS addressbook? Or a hyperlink-enabled persistent chatroom? To be fair, I don’t hear that last often, but summing up what Twitter is and what it does is challenging — especially in 140 characters or less. Twitter’s own “social messaging utility where people can communicate in real-time” comes close. Twitter’s creators know better than most what they’ve created and how it works.

Other takes on Twitter range far and wide:

• Caroline Middlebrook described Twitter as “an incredibly powerful marketing & community building tool.”
• In a long post that describes how he discovered Twitter and how SocialText is using it, Ross Mayfield called Twitter “mobile social software that lets you broadcast and receive short messages with your social network” aka, “Continuous partial presence.”
• Wendy Boswell writes that Twitter is a “mini-blogging platform that you can use to send messages of 140 characters or less to family, friends, or just the general Web community.”
• Dave Winer explains Twitter as a network of users on a microblogging platform with its own open-identity system and ecosystem.
• Ed Kohler posted that Twitter is “a social networking site based around text messaging.”

WhatIsTwitter.com is addressing the question by hosting a contest that asks you to explain Twitter in 140 seconds. (It runs through 6/23/08, if you’d like to enter.)

When I tweeted the question to the Twitter community, Robbert replied that Twitter was “a great way to get in touch and ‘meet’ very interesting people!” and Liz tweeted back that “Twitter is a window into other people’s worlds. Scholars can get insulated so it is nice to hear the ups & downs in other fields.”

In the end, however, I think a shade on Wikipedia’s current definition comes closest: a free distributed social networking and microblogging service that may be updated from the Web, IM, cellphone or a desktop client.

The question of what, exactly, you can DO with Twitter is something else altogether. The session at Enterprise 2.0 devoted to microblogging addressed exactly that question. The discussion was lively, both in person and on Twitter itself, as we could all see on the screen as Laura Fitton (@pistachio) Twittered about the event.

Even though at least one member in the audience questioned the etiquette of such an embedded distraction, with respect to her engagement with the rest of the panel, the bulk of the conversation between the other Twitterers in the audience and those present was inquisitive, supportive and engaged. You can see the various streams of conversation around the session and the conference in general at Twemes.com by using the hashtags #e20, #en20 and #ent20.

With the notable exception of Loren Feldman from 1938Media, the panelists supported the idea of Twitter or something like it (call it “X enterprise microblogging platform”) being both useful and present within an enterprise in the near future.

So what’s the story? Have I lost you yet? Do many of the terms above need further explanation? A colleague looked at me recently with a quirked eyebrow and asked me if I seriously expected her to ask conference-going IT professionals to “Tag their tweets on Twitter” and all I could do was grin.

Like so many emergent services and ecosystems on the Web, Twitter has evolved its own lingo. I’ve blogged about Twitter for WhatIs.com before, of course, but it’s worth reviewing the basics. Here’s a quick guide to get you started and give you some of your own”Twitter-fu.”

The Basics: For the novice Twitter user

By now, the story of how Twitter came to be has been extensively documented, so I’ll leave it to others to tell the tale. Check out this great video from Common Craft, Twitter in Plain English:



You can update Twitter from Twitter.com, which is how the majority of users access the service, from instant messenger or by texting to “40404″ with a cellphone registered with the service. If you do use a cellphone, remember that there may be associated charges for text messages of .10 or .15 per message. Early adopters of the Twitter and the iPhone discovered to their chagrin that thousands of texts got quite expensive. If you’re planning on using your cellphone to tweet, seriously consider investing in an unlimited text messaging plan.

No matter what, you’ll need to register first. Choose the username that fits you, your brand, your company, service, product or simply your whim. Try to make it as short as possible; you want to reserve as much space as possible for others to use in replies, since they’ll need to include your username in a reply.

Here’s where one of the conventions that Twitter has introduced into the Web comes into play. Instead of remembering both a username and a domain name ( johndoe at yahoo.com), all you have to do is remember a username (@johndoe). Just type in go to twitter.com, add the user name to the url and click “follow.”

If you want to publicly reply to a tweet from another user, just include @johndoe in your message and he or she will automatically see it. Just click “replies” on your Twitter page to see how has responded to you. You can also direct message another user by typing “d johndoe” — but only if they are following you. This is quite useful for conversation you don’t want the entire Web to be involved in.

There are other etiquette concerns, paralleling netiquette on the rest of the Web; read Chris Brogan’s post Considering Social Media Etiquette and Grammer Girl’s Twitter Style Guide to get a flavor of the conventions at play.

Ready to go? Start at the Twitter homepage, which includes a useful Twitter FAQ TwitterFeed. Each time you post to Twitter, it’s called a “tweet.” Each tweet has its own URL, just like a “normal” blog post has a permalink. Twitter’s 140 character limit means that brevity is crucial, so using URL shorteners like TinyURL.com is a must. You can make your first update just like a blog post on Blogger or Wordpress. “Hello World” would work, if you’re stuck for inspiration.

Twitter isn’t much fun, however, if you’re just twittering into the ether. To get the most from the service, you’ll need to find some friends or find interesting feeds to follow, like @MarsPhoenix or @BarackObama. MC Hammer is out there too, by the way. You can always just search for people you know on Twitter or go to a user’s profile page if you already know someone you want to “follow.” Once you get rolling, you can use a service like WhoShouldIFollow.com to find more friends.

Following means that you’ll get all of that person’s updates, so choose carefully. If you choose to follow top Twitterers, expect to see a lot of messages. This is a great way to discover interesting new people, however, so even if you don’t follow @Scobleizer, @LeoLaporte , @JasonCalacanis, @KevinRose or other A-list bloggers or “cewebrities,” make sure to check their profiles to see who they’ve discovered. You can always unsubscribe if someone posts content or links you don’t want to see in your feed.

The other symbol you’ll see often is the hashtag, which is the Twitter version of a social bookmark. Think of them as a way to add your tweets to niche conversations, specific events or around products or services. Learn more at hashtags.org. I mentioned them earlier when I listed the various hashtags for the Enterprise 2.0 Conference. By adding a # sign and then a series of numbers and letters afterwards (try #beatLA, for Celtics-lovers) your tweets will be aggregated into the great conversation.

Twitter has opened its application programming interface (API) to the development community , which has responded by creating many desktop clients that you can use to update the service, manage your messages and friends.

To use my favorite client, Twirl, you’ll need to download Adobe AIR and install Twirl as a desktop client. Twirl includes a URL shortener and many other features that, in my humble opinion, richly enhance your Twitter experience. Twirl can also be configured to post automatically to Pownce and Jaiku, two other popular microblogging services. If you use a Mac, Twitterific might be a good fit, too.

Rafe Needleman has posted a terrific “Newbie’s Guide to Twitter” over at Webware.com, which I highly recommend if you’re still having trouble getting started.

Getting into the conversation: For the intermediate Twitter user

Now that you’ve gotten your feet wet, here are some more services to expand your horizons.

You can monitor whatever keyword you choose, like your name or your company’s brandname, at Tweetscan. Even if you don’t choose to use Twitter actively, this is an important component of brand and reputation management.

You can see threaded conversations with Quotably. This is a useful tool if you want to see an entire back and forth between users in one place.

Similarly, Summize helps you track Twitter conversations in real-time.

Use Mobile Twitter if you have a BlackBerry, Treo or other smartphone with a browser or try out Hahlo.com if you have an iPhone.

There’s a dedicated BlackBerry client called TwitterBerry too, which is worth looking into if you’re a “CrackBerry Addict.”

Quakk, Tiny Twitter, TwitToday and Twobile all work as clients for Windows Mobile 5.

Facebook has a Twitter application that embeds your tweets in your profile and allows you to tweet from within the social networking environment.

You can display your latest tweets automatically on your blog with an embedded widget, like this Twitter widget for Wordpress or the Twitter Widget for Blogger.

Or, if you want to hook up your blog’s feed to Twitter, Twitterfeed will be helpful.

Watch Twittervision to see a mashup of a global Google Map and location-specific tweets.

Use TwitPic to share photos on Twitter.

For the Advanced Twitter User

If you’ve gotten this far and have been nodding your head all the time, waiting for something new, congratulations: Your Twitter-Fu is strong. The Twitter Fan Wiki should be your resource of choice, where new applications, services and software is aggregated and vetted by a strong user community. If you’re an alpha geek, make sure to check out the scripts page, which is chock full of geeky goodness.

I’m far from the first to try to explain what Twitter is an how it works, of course. Make sure to check out Tweeternet.com for an excellent explanation and outstanding list of Twitter tools.

If you’ve mastered the basic and intermediate tools and technologies, consider the following ways that Twitter has been put to good use:

• As a social justice tool, where people in critical situations can get the news out quickly
• As a crisis response and management tool (check out @RedCross)
• As a presence tool for emergency workers or individuals in a natural disaster zone

If you have questions, thoughts, additional resources, uses or any other response to this post, please use the comments. And, of course, Twitter about it. Do you think Twitter — or a client like it — is right for your business or enterprise? Let us know!

Jun 11 2008   3:56PM GMT

Video: What is Intellipedia? Burke and Dennehy explain how wikis are being used at the CIA

Posted by: Alexander Howard
innovation, culture, learning, invention, collaboration, community, tool, information, trend, geek, government, enterprise 2.0

Download Title
Sometimes celebrity is all about context. Stars of film, sport and stage may be instantly recognized and celebrated on the street. Other notables may fly under the radar — often intentionally so. Here at Enterprise 2.0, however, the “Intellipedia Evangelist” and “Intellipedia Doyen” have received rockstar treatment ever since their presentation this morning. Thanks to help from Alex Dunne, I’ve embedded their presentation above.

Ivy has blogged about Intellipedia before, nearly a year ago. Since then, the agencies have been making steady progress in exploring the potential for wikis and blogs internally and using them for information sharing, discussion, surfacing subject matter experts and deciphering the intelligence puzzle embedded in the massive amount of monitored noise. The question of adoption or barriers around older generations turned out not to be at issue. It’s not an age problem at all — the number one contributor at the CIA is 69 with 40 years of exp. Young people conform to a given culture quickly; it’s really about how the tools are presented and valued. Getting the first couple of edits made is the most important thing to novice users, given the need for a low barrier to adoption. One of the first projects at Intellipedia was an acronym list, in fact, which was a perfect fit for those “novices” and an invaluable tool for new employees that needed to decipher internal jargon.

I may be able to get an video with the two later, though given some concerns about too much exposure from their press office, we’ll see. When I met with both men in person this afternoon, along with a project manager from the NSA, each offered more insight into the cultural barriers inherent in opening up intelligence sharing through wikis at the agency. Given that national security, highly classified information, sources and methods could all be exposed, there are plenty of relevant concerns. That being said, Intellipedia was created in the aftermath of 9/11, when the relationships, structure, connections and methodology employed by the nation’s intelligence agencies were being reexamined at a fundamental level. The inspiration for the project sprung from seeing the style of information sharing and collaboration engendered and enabled by wikis, particularly in the history and discussion pages. Now, facts and analysis may be shared, vetted, sourced and debated internally, with a focus on discovery instead of control. Notably, the suite of social computing tools that are being used are distributed throughout the sixteen different intelligence agencies. Where analysts once might have used email and slides to share knowledge, now they can move their insights ont othe platform. Agents in Iraq can (and do) edit and collaborate in real-time with great effect with the distributed global intelligence community, posting videos, documents and commentary. Simply replacing Powerpoint with a wiki turns out to an incredibly powerful tool.

There are some crucial differences between Intellipedia and Wikipedia, the world’s most famous wiki. At Intellipedia, contributors must always be identified and operate from an attributable point of view, vs. Wikipedia’s famous neutral point of view (NPOV). At Wikipedia, the bulks of the edits tend to be made by a core group of editors, vs contributions by many from the intelligence community. And, obviously, the discussions and facts cited are highly classified and secure.

Sean and Don also presented 3 core principles of social software for enterprise users that everyone would do well to consider:

1. Work at broadest audience possible
2. Think topically, not organizationally
3. Replace existing business processes

I should note that there have been some rumors flying around the conference that the famous CIA World Factbook might be made into a wiki; unfortunately, this speculation was dashed as just that. Just goes to show — it’s hard to get good intelligence unless you go right to the source.

Apr 23 2008   8:46AM GMT

Video: Exploring presence technology with tele-immersive dance in cyberspace

Posted by: Alexander Howard
applications, virtual, media, Technology, fun, video, YouTube, new media, Internet, innovation, cool, culture, college, learning, academics, interesting, invention, event, creativity, collaboration, participation, interactive media, music, mashup, science, virtual reality, geek, demonstration

Often the title of a video alone raises an eyebrow. Today’s video selection certainly does — it’s a presentation from two tele-immersion labs, one at UC Berkeley’s Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) and the other within the University of Urbana-Champaign Computer Science Department. According to the IEEE Computer Society, tele-immersion is when “collaborators at remote sites share the details of a virtual world that can autonomously control computation, query databases, and gather results.” It might be a stretch but I see tele-immersion used in that was as an advanced version of presence technology, in which an application make it possible to locate and identify a computing device wherever it might be, as soon as the user connects to the network.

As it’s a dance performance, both labs worked in close collaboration with the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley, and the Dance Department and Intermedia Program at Mills College. The video quality admittedly isn’t great — and you may want to skip ahead to 11:30, when the actual performance begins, or to 20:00, when the dancing starts — but the concept itself is noteworthy for its aspiration to bridge the gap between real and virtual environments.

From the show notes on YouTube:

The Resonance Project Dance Group performed for a very large crowd in the Hearst Memorial Mining Building at UC Berkeley. The performance was a blend of live, modern dance with live tele-immersed dancers from University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois. Using a large network of cameras and computers the dancers were able to span the geographic distance and mingle in cyberspace. The computers merged three-dimensional video images of the dancers onto a single projection, which was broadcast alongside live dancers.

The Resonance Project is a team of choreographers, dancers, computer engineers, and visual and sound artists who are investigating concepts of presence/remote presence and corporeal and code interactivity within live and media based performance. Unique to the project is the use of a “performance as research” model, within which scientists and artists collaborate to explore a re-visioning of cyber culture and corporeal presence.

The nature of the performance has a close conceptual relationship with CAVE, a tele-immersive environment used for learning in a wide variety of disciplines, and the CAVEman, the first 4-D human atlas.

Apr 11 2008   8:14AM GMT

Video: Internet addiction, measured with the K-scale

Posted by: Alexander Howard
video, YouTube, Internet, culture, trend, blogging, gaming

If you’re online for more than 30 hours of non-work surfing every week, experience withdrawal symptoms and find your relationships with friends, family and coworkers suffering, you might be an Internet addict. This video, hosted by Kimberly S. Young, introduces netaddiction.com. Young is the  founder of the Center for Internet Addiction Recovery. Take their Internet addiction test to see where your own usage rates.

Today’s Word of the Day, K-scale, or “Korean scale,” is a checklist used for diagnosing and evaluating Internet addiction.

Mar 31 2008   11:58PM GMT

Happy April Fools’ Day 2008: A roundup of the Web’s best jokes, hoaxes and lies

Posted by: Alexander Howard
Google, Web 2.0, media, fun, Internet, commentary, culture, interesting, event, creativity, resource, community, Rails, humor, history, geek

In 2008, April Fools’ Day Jokes are everywhere. Here’s a roundup list of some of the best/worst of the lot.

Gday, MATE, from Google Australia. Future search! A great follow-up from the company that has brought us Google MentalPlex and PigeonRank technologies, along with openings for Googlelunaplex on the moon and a smart-drink called GoogleGulp! MATE™ stands for Machine Automated Temporal Extrapolation.

Google’s prank in the US, Google Custom Time, involves messing about with time as well, utilizing “an e-flux capacitor to resolve issues of causality (see Grandfather Paradox).” Send your emails back in time! Amaze your friends!

YouTube links will RickRoll you. All of the featured videos for YouTube UK and YouTube Australia link to aRick Astley video. If you aren’t familiar with RickRolling - it’s when someone puts a link on website to something, but it actually takes you to a music video of Rick Astley’s ‘ Never Gonna Give You Up.’

TechCrunch sues Facebook for $25 million in Statutory Damages. You have to get to the end before the jokiness shows up. Can you tell Michael is a lawyer?

Shakespeare Ghost Writer. Because everyone needs the bard.

Pay Per Tweet from Problogger. This one spawned some pretty funny reactions on Twitter when it was announc

Even our friends over at CNET are getting into the fun, reporting that TechCrunch has acquired TigerBeat and renamed it CrunchKids.

Watch out, however, as there’s a major backlash brewing in the blogosphere. ValleyWag’s Paul Boutin captured the zeitgeist quite succintly in Your April Fools’ Prank Sucks:

April Fools’ Day in tech has devolved over the past two decades into lazy online hoaxes… Worse, the goal is no longer in-house camaraderie, but Internet publicity. Some companies notify the press of their hoaxes a week early, in hopes of securing coverage. We thought about running their emails as they came in, just to pop their bubbles. But there’s no laugh in giving away an unfunny joke. Look, if you want attention, why not ship a real product? That seems easier.

Anil Dash elaborated further, stating that Your April Fools’ Day Joke Continues to Suck.

Ouch. Ok, guys. We get it. But I’m still laughing. I’ve even posted a prank played upon me from last year on the right, a well-implemented foiling of my desk and everything on it.

If you’re hungry for more, there are some hoary classics out there, like John C. Dvorak’s Drunk Modeming and April Fools’ Phone from Penn & Teller. WhatIs.com’s joke for the day was Electricity over IP , if you missed it. Michael Morisey had some fun at Cisco’s expense over at SearchNetworking.com, too. Make sure to read Cisco re-thinks Layer 8 networking with green components to learn about The Human-Like Network.

Slashdot is having a merry time with an April Fools’ Day Prank Roundup thread that includes a five pranks you can build in the office, Wired’s top 10 practical jokes for nerds, Lifehacker’s Top 10 harmless geek pranks and Jack Shafer’s guide over at Slate.com on how to protect yourself from the media’s prankish habits. Jack linked to the Top 100 April Fools’ Day Hoaxes Of All Time, which shouldn’t be missed.

The folks over at /. did miss a few, however.

• ReadWriteWeb posted 10 Places to Get Fooled on April 1st
• Ask Metafilter is collecting suggestions for great office pranks
• PCWorld has a list of the 10 Ten April Fools’ Day websites, many of which you’ll see above

Unfortunately, I have work to do (a host of new definitions, naturally) but Patrick Altoft is liveblogging April Fools’ Day 2008. Just check in with him to see what’s new. April Fools’ Day on the Web is doing a great job of cataloging new pranks as well.

***
UPDATE: I couldn’t resist. Thanks to a tweet from Dan Sandler, I learned about the announcement of a Legend of Zelda movie.

UPDATE: I think this one takes the cake for most chutzpah, given that both parties are publicly traded: Infoworld announces that Microsoft and Yahoo! have agreed on a buyout price.

UPDATE: And as the day comes to a close, Wikipedia’s entry for April 1, 2008 has over 158 different hoaxes and jokes that were made in the news media, in sports, in video games, on websites, on television, in podcasts, and on the radio.

I bet my friend Brian’s favorite is the report from Chicago Public Radio that “Major League Baseball has retroactively awarded the 1945 World Series title to the Chicago Cubs, due to an alleged ineligible playere appearing on the roster of the Detroit Tigers.”

Personally, I can’t wait to get my hands on some Spazztroids to munch on while I queue up my Betamax to HD-DVD Converter to watch old episodes of the Muppet Show. (Thanks, Thinkgeek!) I hope they can distract me from the USB Pregnancy Test I’m giving my PC.