Book by Craig Venter – A Life Decoded: My Genome: My Life
Well, I was wondering when someone would write a book about Venter (who deserves a Nobel, a few times over).
Turns out he wrote one himself. I think I gotta get me a copy.
I found out about this book through an article on him in Salon that my wife sent me. I haven’t read the article, but will on my long trip tomorrow.
Link: Amazon.com: A Life Decoded: My Genome: My Life: Books: J. Craig Venter:
A great deal has been written about Venter as the head of Celera, the private research company that won a race with the National Institutes of Health’s Human Genome Project to sequence the human genome. His role in this historic accomplishment has been both vilified and praised. Now, in a clumsily written autobiography, Venter offers his side of the story, portraying himself as the eternal underdog, fighting for truth and attempting to make scientific discoveries solely to help others. (Publishers Weekly).
links for 2007-12-07
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Thinking hard about this today. Gotta see how things have changed in the last year or two.
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Heh, if I told you how we used to do rotoscoping back in the day, you’d piss your pants.
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“The object of MIKONTALOLIGHTS was to create the world’s physically largest colored graphics platform by using the windows of Mikontalo’s D-staircase as light pixels.”
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[this guy is a genius] ‘There’s all sorts of novel foodstuffs to be discovered on the menus. Today for dessert, we can enjoy currant quark. You take several kilos of currants and anticurrants, then accelerate them in a 6 – 30 km ring to an energy of up to
Stephen Johnston in Vodafone Receiver #19 on: Thoughts on 3.0 – this time with added You-nicorn
Stephen Johnston has contributed an article to Vodafone’s Receiver mag (see link below). Cool (way to go, Stephen).
He pegs the current discussion around ‘what’s next’ on the Web, progressing from the start of the Web – info – through the current push – people – to where it might be going – semantics.
He rightfully points out that, once more, folks are thinking tech rather than user. Just the other day I was bemoaning that RDFSs or OWLs and what not that ‘librarians’ need to attach to everything manually by processing everything is NOT the future, but some dream of MIT-types (we have a few semWeb folks at Nokia, too).
For some time now, I’ve been characterizing the waves of Web as ‘them web’, publishers moving into the digital world, pushing top-down info to the vast public; ‘me web’, people becoming the publishers themselves, yet still pushing ‘content’ to the public; and ‘my web’, the connection between me and mine, ring-fenced world of content pools.
This semWeb talk has me thinking that there is a need for all the stuff that has been created to be made more useful. For example, how can all the info in BioMed Central, PLoS, or Wikipedia (1st wave publishing), user comments and notes (2nd wave publishing), relationships between readers, commentors, and creators (3rd wave?) mesh together in a self-making semantic web of content, interactions, and meaning WITHOUT some braniac librarians annotating the world for us?
I want it to grow, much the same way the Web had been growing, by people going about their business, bottom up, rather than pushed at us and based on some W3C working group multi-year RFP structure, top down.
It’s up to us to create the tools and services that folks use that helps them attach meaning to the Web, much like paths across a campus quad arise by the daily choices of the users. And, as Stephen points out (of course, we work for the same company, too), the mobile phone has a big role to play as some hyper-nifty sensor (and lots of us bring in the concept of ‘context’).
Indeed, all this semWeb stuff has returned to the forefront of my thinking due to a chance encounter with the folks at BioMed Central, an open access publisher of scientific papers, results, and studies. I’ve known about semWeb for a long while. But now, I see semWeb popping up all over the place. I hope there’s something to it.
Link: Vodafone Receiver » #19 | Thoughts on 3.0 – this time with added You-nicorn:
What I’m looking for in 3.0 is the truly breakthrough user experiences that hit you in the stomach, the way that using Google (and Google Earth) did the first time you used it, or the way that Mocha’s little legs (see above video) wiggle in a furry flurry of happiness.
links for 2007-12-06
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“USA based, AT&T has announced plans to exit the shrinking payphone business by the end of 2008. AT&T’s Public Communications unit has continued to experience significant pressure from reduced payphone usage, primarily as a result of the growth of mob…”
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“Animoto is an online site that will automatically analyse your images and music, and then composite them for you into a dynamic video with professional transitions and effects.”
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“Figures released by industry analyst Informa Telecoms & Media reveal that worldwide mobile penetration will hit 50 per cent – or around 3.3 billion subscriptions – on Thursday, just over 26 years since the first cellular network was launched.”
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“Loïc Le Meur has come up with 10 rules for anyone wanting to be successful in business, after he learned to break all of the accepted ones himself. France’s best-known blogger has at times alienated his audience, offended his countrymen…”
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“While many Silicon Valley start-ups begin by operating in “stealth mode” to keep their big ideas secret, extrovert entrepreneur Loic Le Meur is taking the opposite approach in his latest venture, Seesmic.com.”
I’ll be in SFO next week
Folks, I haven’t been to the US since June. Feels like a dog’s age.
Unfortunately, my schedule is packed and spread out all over the place.
In any case, let me know if you’re around and I’ll see if we can met up.
Maybe I should just do a bar meet-up, what.*
See ya!
*When I told my wife about the idea of just setting a place and time and notifying all your friends to meet up there, she’s sort of now made it her main way to meet up with all our friends, heh.
Ah, con-men exist in every medium
I also got a shoulder tap about some shady dealing (see link below) from an online publisher. It not only bugs me that this gives other publishers a bad name and erodes trust in the openness of relationships built over the Web, but that he did this to folks I know, worse yet, GOOD and TRUSTING folks I know.
I’ve been a writer for a long time and have valued my work, so I am always on the look out for those who would take advantage of me. I am not saying that my friends could have seen this coming – you really can’t – but I suppose we need to talk amongst ourselves to make sure this doesn’t happen too often.
Alas, a previous guy Oliver dealt with had proposed I join his publishing network. The guy tried to stroke my ego, as if I were some online n00b writer, but the deal was so krappy that I turned it away.
Oliver and gang, I wish you the best as you guys pick up the pieces and move on.
I also wish you the best in getting this guy canned.
Link: David Harper’s Different Things » Blog Archive » What’s Up With Blognation’s Founder?:
Several friends of mine were affected by questionable business practices of Blognation’s founder. Please see Oliver Starr’s “Open Letter to Sam Sethi” (Reposted in full below with permission of the author.) Then head over to Debi Jones who continues the story with “Blognation: The Blogger’s Prelude and Tale.“
mTrends on Dopplr going mobile
Rudy, over at mTrends is breaking the story that Dopplr will launch a mobile version tomorrow.
Good for them. It’s been really nice to see Dopplr slowly grow and add some simple and useful features around their main feature of ‘declaring the future’.
Tomorrow is an important milestone for me (and the Ovi.com team), as well. We also believe in starting with the simplest core proposition that adds value to a user and then build upon that. If we were to wait for our total vision for Ovi.com to be complete, we probably would never release a thing.
I’ll elaborate more tomorrow.
Link: mTrends – mobile media lifestyle trends – m-trends.org:
Dopplr will announce their mobile site at Nokia World on Tuesday.
BTW, no, I will NOT be at Nokia World. And no, I will NOT be at Le Web 3. Long story.
links for 2007-11-29
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Explore the stars with a real telescope, with real astronomers, with other real people, all from your browser. Gotta try it.
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[squee!] “ScienceBlogs is very much an experiment in science communication, and being first also means being first to encounter unforeseen obstacles. We are learning as we go (and as goes the blogosphere) and appreciate your understanding and patience.”
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[Oh, this stinks. Poor sucker.] “Luck ran out for a $1 million lottery winner who collected his first prize money this week: It turns out that buying the ticket was a probation violation.”
And another Ovi phone – seems like a trend
And another Ovi phone – seems like a trend
Originally uploaded by schickr.
From the same guy started the trend.
flickr.com/photos/schickr/2052434390/