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23 steps to learning about the living web of today.
links for 2007-11-18
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Public access to relevant medical research is not the only benefit of open access publishing, but it is a significant one. For other examples of recent articles that have attracted a wide readership, see BioMed Central ‘Most viewed’ page.
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“a meraki can be used to create a public or private wireless access point from an ethernet connection (from a cable/dsl modem) or from another wireless network. merakis are designed to create mesh networks, meaning that meraki devices can look for routes
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For a good laugh, flip through these.
Ty Burr says ‘Blade Runner’ is better than ever, in The Boston Globe
So far, Ty Burr has never disappointed me. What he likes, I do. What he doesn’t, same here.
Now he mentions the latest Blade Runner release (see link below). He likes it, so I’m gonna check it out.
Blade Runner is one of my all time favourites. Interestingly, in the past month, I’ve ‘discovered’ Philip K Dick, after having watch so many films based on his stories – Blade Runner, Total Recall, Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Minority Report, Next, and Through a Scanner Darkly.
After watching Next, I vowed to find any any any Dick book and picked up a collection from a used bookstore in Melbourne.
Now, I so love Philip K Dick. Why did it take me so long to _read_ his amazing work. He’s got an edge, the heros invariably lose when they win, it’s not la-di-da clever sci-fi, but real people in real dilemmas with tech to add a twist that propels the story.
He makes Herbert and Asimov and Heinlein look like pansies (heh, how many movies do those guys have?*).
Link: ‘Blade Runner’ is better than ever – The Boston Globe:
Still, it’s nice to see Ford looking so young again and LA so old; the clockwork-toy sequences shot in the city’s Bradbury Building, with Daryl Hannah’s Pris cartwheeling through the wreckage like a homicidal wind-up doll; Rutger Hauer’s gleaming, tragic Roy Batty, an automaton so much better than the humans he serves – these are all welcome attendees at a 25th reunion. “Blade Runner” has become a chilly eulogy for a future that hasn’t quite happened.
*I mention these three because the forward in my book mentions how few these guys made (3 among them).
TinyURL should be mobile-savvy
As far as I can tell, TinyURL is not mobile savvy.
I get a ton of TinyURLs now via Twitter over SMS and click them most of the time. I am fortunate to have a mobile browser that can handle most things. But, what if TinyURL recognized a phone and sent the browser to a mobile-formatted page, maybe passed through Mowser?
Russ, if you read this: get on the line with the TinyURL guys and inject some mobile-savviness into them!
Do community tools mix with scientific papers?
I’ve been doing some reading on Open Access Publishing, providing free public access to scientific papers. The two publishers I know the best are Public Library of Science and BioMed Central.
These two publishers are trying hard to change the current publishing model in science, where a journal acts as gatekeeper, selecting the best articles, and then charging readers to subscribe to the journals. Indeed, not only are the subscription prices astronomical sometimes, but authors pay the publisher to publish their paper.
PLoS and BMC therefore, have many reasons to turn this model on its head (and chuck it out the door). But, in the end, to me, they seem like the same publishers they are trying to change – they still do peer-review (gate keeping?) and publish article for reading only.
Of course, being a service designer in this day and age, I wonder how one could take these publishers even further, such as how to bring in the readers to participate via the current common community tools (without digressing on the existence of community), or how to bring in some intelligence (folks or robots) to add value to the large mass of info so that, as a total, the publication can drive more discoveries and insights.
PLoS has done something interesting, creating Journal Clubs online. Journal clubs, a staple in universities, are regular meetings to discuss a research paper of interest (like a book club, except more focused and more geeky). PLoS’s take on it is interesting (see below) – if the discussion around a paper is captured over time, one could chart the evolution of the thinking over time.
Alas, I would not ask someone to read _all_ the comments. To me, this suggests that in this area, the post-comment model might be insufficient.
Link: Journal Clubs – think of the future! | Public Library of Science:
There it is: all laid out – the complete history of molecular biology all in one spot, all the big names voicing their opinions, changing opinions over time, new papers getting published trackbacking back to the Watson-Crick paper and adding new information, debates flaring up and getting resolved, gossip now lost forever to history due to it being spoken at meetings, behind closed door or in hallways preserved forever for future students, historians and sociologists of science.
Mowser get me thinking of emerging markets again
Previously, I mentioned Mowser, the mobile-savvy transcoder by Russ Beattie.
It’s really cool that he has so much traffic. But, it’s even cooler to see that the emerging mobile markets are well represented in the top countries of users, and a good quarter of it comes from India! Along with some other usage data from other services I know, I am really really wondering how things like Winksite, Mowser, and MOSH (from Nokia) are really catering to this unslaked thirst for mobile connectivity and content.
I think there is a place still for mobile-only solutions that cater to the mass-billions of users who have only access to XHTML mobile browsers for all their internet service needs. It’s going to also take a new way of thinking of how to connect folks so that they can form social networks, solely fueled through a simple mobile browser.
I always say that Europeans (North Americans, included) are snobby for thinking that folks in emerging markets and without PCs are clueless and don’t use the same internet-fueled services that most of us take for granted. On the contrary, not only do these folks know _everything_ that they could do if they had a PC, they are frantically looking for ways to hack or do the same things from the only browser they have – their mobile phone.
Before I joined Nokia Multimedia, where Nseries devices reign supreme, I was deep into thinking of what could be done to bring the mass-billions of folks with simpler phone, the last billion of which are in the emerging markets, into the Hyperconnected Age. One of my thoughts did include a transcoder (influenced at the time by Russ, himself). I was trying to add some of the functions that we are used to using in our browser, to be wrapped around this transcoder, giving some interactivity and action.
That said, while playing around with Mowser this past week or so, I was wondering how Mowser could be extended, and stumbled upon this post by Russ about a site that puts, what I call, a wrapper around Mowser. The wrapper makes it easy for you to save some bookmarks that are then opened via Mowser.
I like that and I guess I need to learn to code if I want to play around the same.
Indeed, Russ is encouraging folks to use Mowser in clever ways. There are a bunch of Mowser-types connecting at http://mowser.ning.com/ and publishers and hackers can visit the Mowser Wiki to learn how to take full advantage of Mowser. Guess that includes me, I suppose.
It always take two failures to make a real problem
A CEO (who has now moved on to greater things) of a large and popular Web service once was relating to me a tale of one of his major embarrassing outages and mentioned something I now always look out for:
“It take two things to fail to really cause trouble.” (or something like that)
Y’know: you’re prepared and when the poop hits the fan, you’re respond swimingly. But then something else happens at the same time and it all spirals out of control. I think you all must have stories of such combo-punches.
Well, seems like the folks at Rackspace had a really krummy Monday.* First some stuff went down and then came back. And then a few hours later, a truck took out their power, leading to a second incident related to the power that led to even more servers going down.
Yep, stuff happens.
Rackspace posted a public letter to their customers explaining the outage (link, to which, in the article below). Read more below.
Link: Quick, Plug The Internet Back In: Major Rackspace Outage:
Rackspace’s generators kicked in but, as we’ve seen before, lots of other things can then go wrong. In this case, two chillers within the data center failed to start back up, and a number of servers were taken offline to avoid damage from overheating.
*Heh, I got a tip off on the story from one of my tweeps, @djacobs.
links for 2007-11-13
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[hat tip to infovore]
Google’s Social Design Best Practices – comments from Bokardo
I was following a thread of interesting thoughts and stumbled upon this article from Bokardo that comments on a list of Best Practices that Google put up as part of the OpenSocial release.
Indeed, just last Friday, two colleagues and I were discussing how some folks misunderstand what ‘community‘ is. It seems that some folks think ‘community’ is a thing you build, much like a consumer electronic device: assemble the elements, package it, and, voilá, you have a community. And, also, it seems that these same folks view their target market as a _single_ community that can be serviced in a single way.
But, we all know that’s not the case, in all sorts of dimensions.
Eh, preaching to the choir here.
But, the one question that has been puzzling me is not ‘how does a social networking service capture that first pioneer who brings all her friends into the service?’, nor is it ‘what are the elements of a social networking service that lead to a healthy thriving collection of networks?’. The question that puzzles me is ‘when someone shows up at the door with a friend’s invitation, what is the catalyst* for that person to come in?’
The answer lies in the first point of this Best Practices list ‘engage quickly’. But, that’s a huge effort involved in a single line. For a service to engage quickly, it must be able to show the value of joining YASN immediately. The user is asking herself ‘if I connect to my friend through here, what do I get out of it? what investment will be needed on my part?’.
These answers need to be visible at the outset. And that’s the challenge.
Do you have any good examples of how a social networking service makes its value immediately apparent to a potential new user?
Link: Google’s Social Design Best Practices – Bokardo:
One is that we’re clearly seeing a set of practices emerge across all social software that centers around getting people started quickly, allowing for self-expression, engaged in real-life tasks, yet also allowing for flexible discovery and play. On both this site and others concerned with social design, these are the major themes that arise again and again.
*A ‘catalyst‘, in the way I grew up using it, means something that makes a reaction more likely (without being consumed by it). The reaction still can happen (it is chemically and energetically feasible, though might take forever), but the catalyst lowers the ‘activation energy‘ needed and increases the rate significantly. In this case, the catalyst shortens the decision time for the person join a social network service. 🙂