onfocus

Brian started a public Yahoo! Hacks Flickr Group yesterday to trade some of the more visual Yahoo! hacking going on. Feel free to check it out, join, and/or contribute!

Sometimes a silly Flickr meme is just too good not to pass along: Matt's Recumbent Bike. Could Matt be the new Obey?

The disaster theme continues here at onfocus. There are some great photographs at the USGS Archive. The pictures of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake aftermath are eerie. Tomorrow is the 99th anniversary of the quake, and believe it or not, survivors are gathering to remember it.

I'm still working hard on Yahoo! Hacks so I'm not posting much here. I'll be back to complaining about the world here soon enough. ;)

Even though I'm down to about 4 hours of TV/week, I found myself planted in front of the TV last night watching the Discovery Channel's docuinfotainmovie (I just coined that word, feel free to use it) Supervolcano. It was a dramatization of what might happen if a big magma chamber under Yellowstone National Park were to erupt—destroying surrounding states, and dumping ash on the rest of the world. The movie had lots of geological terms thrown around, and some volcano science thrown in with the cheesy dialog. In one poignant scene, the head US geologist sent his wife and child to London to escape the impending volcano doom. (sk turned to me and said, "I'm glad I didn't marry a seismic geologist!")

The show was surprisingly entertaining—camp and all—because I felt like I was learning something about geology. I think this disaster movie + science fact genre could really take off, and here are a couple of the movies I'd like to see next:

• SuperPeakOil - The United States descends into local feudalism as oil becomes scarce and a land war with China in the Middle East drains every available resource. The evil head of OPEC must be thwarted by a crafty US diplomat, and a prominent oil magnate falls in love with a beautiful alternative energy advocate. It's not just a Long Emergency, it's SuperPeakOil!
• SuperSuperCollider - CERN is the setting for this tale of science gone mad. As a brilliant physicist attempts to study the first few seconds of the big bang in a supercollider, she inadvertently creates a black hole that destroys the earth. She falls in love with an anti-black hole activist, but even their love can not escape the gravity of her physics experiments. Ironically, the black hole triggers another big bang and another scientist billions of years later wants to study the early minutes of the previous big bang, ad infinitum.
• SuperAI - A soulless machine in an MIT laboratory suddenly comes to life seeking to download the consciousness of humans into its neural network. It falls in love with a beautiful luddite who must make the choice between her biological destiny, or eternal life in ones and zeros. Eventually biology looses, and only machines are left to discuss the world amongst themselves. That is, until the ash from a supervolcano clogs their moving parts...and so on.

With a few more over-the-top docuinfotainmovies like these, The Discovery Channel may lure me back to TV.

Update: A new one for The Discovery Channel: Super Gamma Ray Burst. When will a Gamma Ray Burst strike again? We're overdue!

Has anyone put ref="nofollow" on the back of a t-shirt yet?

Update: Of course not, because it's actually rel="nofollow". Greg Hughes was first to T: Don't follow me, please.

I've had my head down writing for the past few days weeks. I'm afraid posts will be thin here while I'm concentrating my writing energy elsewhere. I also haven't left the house in weeks days, so there aren't any new pictures.

I figure, what's worse than a post about not posting? Not posting.

I set up a Yahoo! Group for Yahoo! Hacks. The funny part is, the word "hack" isn't allowed in group descriptions, so I had to disguise the word as "h4ck". I'm hoping this book will help change that. ;)



If you're interested in discussing potential Yahoo! h4cks or just want to follow along, tune into the Yahoo! Hacks Group.

Update (3/31): Unfortunately, I had to make the Yahoo! Hacks Group invite-only instead of open to the public. With this many years of working on the web, you'd think I would have learned some fundamental truths about it by now. ;) What can I say, I'd like to be optimistic.

Now that etech has come and gone, I can finally talk about my latest project: Yahoo! Hacks. I'm writing furiously now, and the book will be edited by Brian Sawyer at O'Reilly. (Here's a shot Brian took of me signing the contract at etech. And vice versa.) If you've been watching tech news at all lately, you know this is an exciting time to be focusing on Yahoo! Somewhere between the Flickr deal, their new weblog tool, web services, the buzz game, Yahoo! Music, their publisher network, My Yahoo! RSS, (and the list goes on) it seems that Yahoo! is morphing into something new. I'm looking forward to writing about what they're up to, and how you can use the rest of their domain in unique ways.

As with all of the books in the Hacks series, Yahoo! Hacks will be a group effort. You can think of me as a hacks curator, bringing together the best tips, tricks, and code I can find. That means I need help from you—the hack artisan—in bringing novel Yahoo! uses to a wider audience. Do you use Yahoo! in a way that Yahoo! may not have envisioned? I'd love to hear about it. (And if you'd like to share a hack publicly, feel free to post it at the Hacks site.) I contributed Google Smackdown to Google Hacks way back when, and as you can tell that led to more and more hacks-related writing for me. There's something satisfying about showing others you can do more with technology than what you'll find in the help docs. Plus it's fun to see your work in (what feels like) a more permanent and tactile medium like a book—I hope you'll consider contributing.

The schedule for the book is pretty fast, so I'd like to apologize to my friends and family up front—see ya in a few months! ;) In the meantime, I'll be one with Yahoo!

Luckily I was able to change my schedule a bit last week so I could go to the San Diego Zoo on Friday. I've often heard it called a zoo that does things right, and it really was the best zoo I've been to. Here are a few photos—

I'm glad I got to see a bit more of San Diego than the conference hotel.

ETech Day 3 (for me) was yesterday, so I'm a bit late with the GIPs (generic info-packets).

• Lawrence Lessig started the day with a talk called Re:MixMe. He made the case that the ordinary way culture has been built has been through remixing—recombining pieces of the culture in different ways—and recent changes in technology have meant less freedom to remix. New "ordinary ways" to communicate mean laws need to change to protect rather than limit freedom to communicate.
• JC Herz talked about some emerging military technology. There was an impressive demo of cheap and fast photorealistic 3-D rendering. And a look at some "scene understanding" technology that allows a computer to find targets in a video stream and move the camera to follow their movement. I had the creeps throughout. (It's an important reminder to me to think through the potential application of any technology I work on.)
• In a very surprising session, Paula Le Dieu from the BBC announced that they would be encouraging their users to rip, mix, and burn their content. Instead of sending lawyers after people who use BBC material in ways they may not have envisioned, they'll be encouraging use of their "creative archive". Unfortunately, their creative commons-inspired licenses will only apply in the UK, but she said they're working internally to make it an international effort. She left with the question: Could big media companies enable massive creativity?
• Chris Anderson from Wired explained his Long Tail concept in detail. One point: recommendation engines push people into the long tail of non-hit (or past-hit) products. And we have an abundance of recommendation engines these days.
• I heard Marc Hedlund talk about getting venture capital funding for a project. It was interesting to hear his stories—like hearing travel notes from some exotic locale I'll probably never visit. A point: get your company to the point where you don't need VC funding to be in a position to get VC funding.
• Danny O'Brien and Merlin Mann talked about Life Hacks, which are productivity tips & tricks that alpha geeks implement for themselves, but don't often share with others. One point: change your work habits to make failure difficult. If you think about your system of working as if it was a software system, you can think about "hacking" it to improve efficiency and get more stuff done.
• I saw Ev's demo of his new application: Odeo. This whole podcasting thing could be big. The app is surprisingly polished for something still in alpha testing. One impressive bit is a Flash interface for recording and mixing audio.
• Ben Trott talked about making web services personal. He announced Six Apart Power Tools, and showed how you could grab existing data and turn it into some compelling applications. One point: there is a lot of metadata out there (FOAF, Exif tags) just waiting for the connections to be exposed.
• And finally, Mark Fletcher of Bloglines fame talked about his "rules of thumb" for birthing web startups. Lots of practical advice about funding, servers, and system administration.

And that brings my emerging technology adventure to an end. It was a great conference and now I'm tired.

There was no less information on Day 2 (for me) of ETech, but some packets are definitely being dropped en route. ;) Here are some more generic info-packets from the sessions I was at today:

• The theme of looking to biology for digital inspiration continued today with Neil Gershenfeld linking digital fabrication with ribosomes. He called the human body a machine that includes all of the instructions for making itself. (In a way.) He discussed the illiberal art of making things, and machines that can make machines; fabrication labs that can produce more fabrication labs. (His forthcoming book: Fab: Personal Fabrication, Fab Labs, and the Factory in Your Computer.)
• As the discussion of fabrication continued, Gershenfeld mentioned the value of digital fabrication would be found in the "market of 1" where the prototype is the product.
• Cory Doctorow eloquently discussed the dangers of giving up too much liberty in the pursuit of less complex systems. He said that we've given up a lot in the battle against spam (closed relays, time and effort) but haven't gained a thing. We all still get spam. More of the same type of controls won't fix anything, and what will we give up in the process? (The same goes for DRM.)
• Jimmy Wales from Wikipedia talked about collaboration on a massive scale. The English Wikipedia site has over 500,000 articles—written and categorized by volunteers. (Also: he feels group sites solve problems he called author fatigue and quality control.)
• Clay Shirky interviewed Stewart from Flickr, Joshua from del.icio.us, and Wales from Wikipedia about mass categorization and user-tagging. One point: hierarchies are completely different from folksonomies, so stop comparing them. (Also: tagging doesn't really address individual vs. group tension, but it's "good enough" at what it does.)
• James Surowiecki quoted Pascal, "All man's miseries derive from not being able to sit quietly in a room alone." (Which sort of sounds like Sartre's "Hell is other people.") But of course it's not that simple for a guy who wrote a book called The Wisdom of Crowds. He talked about the good and bad of group interaction, information cascade, and the value of diversity/randomness in group selection.
• Joel Spolsky discussed the importance of aesthetics in design, and ways to let users feel they're more in control of the applications they use. (He mentioned the book, Learned Helplessness.)
• Jeremy Zawodny gave a tour of Yahoo!'s Web Services, and their new developer network. He mentioned that they used their Web Services to add an RSS-subscriptions feature for Yahoo! search results. (It just took a couple hours to implement.)
• And James Larson showed video of some of his crazy hardware hacks. They included a VCR he turned into a scheduled pet-feeder, and "biometric silverware" that can measure stress (sort of).

And such. I guess my info-packets are blurring into overviews.

I'm at the Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego. ETech always expands my geek consciousness, and I can't possibly write a summary of everything I've learned today. Here's a stab at one generic info-packet from each presentation I saw today:

• One point that Tim O'Reilly and Rael Dornfest made in the O'Reilly Radar session is that data is the next "intel inside" (eg. Navteq powers most web mapping applications).
• Stewart Butterfield used the term curate when talking about Flickr's favorites feature. This is a nice improvement over sharing favorites, or publishing bookmarks. I think the term curate shows a respect for users and their data.
• It's not always easy to extend firefox, but at least you can—and in many ways.
• Danny Hillis demonstrated the value of interacting with technology in a group, face-to-face. He showed video of a table—with an interactive display as the tabletop—which lets the user scroll and zoom around map data. Like rolling a paper map out onto a table, this device allows for pointing, eye-contact, speech, and body-language. But it uses the dynamic digital display, which we're all used to using in isolation. (Also: he showed video of a 3-D topographic map table that looks like it's from the future.)
• Jeff Bezos introduced an extension to RSS developed by Amazon that lets people syndicate search results. It's called Open Search RSS, and it adds a few tags to describe the results in the file: totalResults, startIndex, and itemsPerPage. (Also: vertical search columns in A9 provided by anyone.)
• Microsoft Research is working on a wearable computing device called a SenseCam. It measures motion, temperature, infrared, gps position, and takes still photos at various points. It's like a "black box recorder" for people. He mentioned practical uses for patients with memory loss, or "automatic tourist recording" for vacationers—but I can't get past the privacy implications. What if the government could mandate that people wear this, and have all of the data sent to the home office?
• Yahoo! Research Labs announced a joint-venture with O'Reilly called Tech Buzz Game. It sounds like a virtual stock-market for tech terms that may be able to predict/track tech trends through which words are "bought" and "sold" most.
• Google Labs has some cool user-interface stuff like the slider for Google Personalization that takes you from min to max personalized results.
• George Dyson gave a history of Von Neumann's pioneering inventions that are now ubiquitous in computer hardware. One idea that struck me is thinking about each individual node on a network (IP Address) as a cell. Thinking with this metaphor, it seems we're in pre-historic times, and the cells need to evolve into larger, more complex organisms. (Note to self: study more computing history. [And biology?]) Cory Doctorow's notes.
• AT&T Labs wants to "virtually bleach" the network to get rid of spam, but I wonder what else might be sanitized in the process.
• Chis Heathcote and Matt Jones talked about taking computing beyond the monitor. They showed that they could exchange business card data by touching their phones together, and mentioned that Dance Dance Revolution is the biggest success in body/digital interaction.
• Nelson Minar from Google pointed out why SOAP isn't easy.
• And then Sam Ruby pointed out why "simple" HTTP isn't easy. (Which reminded me that Bertrand Russel said, "Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise." Maybe we're getting to a point where we need the Web to be more precise.)

And those are the Day 1 packets—a lot to think about.