Announcements/The Narrative

The ‘Quiet’ post

Posted on by charlie

07082008956-1

Every so often a site has the ‘oh, sorry for being so quiet’ post. This is sort-of one of them.

Stream of bookmark consciousness

I used to have the delicious auto-posting feature set up to share bookmarks right here, but as you can tell, it seemed to stop long ago (maybe around their big change?) and I can’t get it going again. So, if you want to know what I’ve been thinking, you can get a glimpse from my delicious stream (also see in left side-bar).

<http://del.icio.us/cschick>

Work writing

I think most of you know that I have been running Nokia Conversations.

<http://conversations.nokia.com>

Yeah, lots of my writing energy is going there. It’s been interesting and we’re trying to see how far we can go before getting fired. So far, there have been a few hand-taps, but we haven’t had to change or take anything down. My boss’ boss keeps telling me to try harder. As my wife says, ‘If you aren’t falling down, you aren’t trying hard enough.’

Visual contrails

The other place I have been quiet has been my Flickr stream (and my folks are upset).

<http://www.flickr.com/photos/schickr/>

The main reason is that my phone got munged by a car door and I stopped taking photos. I did get another camera phone, but it was a lower resolution and I was too snobby to use it (though it was more than enough a few years ago).

Well, I started taking photos again recently and will upload a few.

Another thing that has been affecting my online life is me toying with various aspects of my 1100 Club thought – moving over to a text-voice phone for a while. By removing some of the habits I have gained with a net-connected phone, I wanted to see what would be affected. And it’s been interesting.

<http://conversations.nokia.com/home/2008/09/announcing-the.html>

Internal machinations

I’ve been holding onto the thoughts that remain once I dump them into Nokia Conversations, partly because I am not feeling the urge to share them here (sorry). Oh, I have been sharing them in real-life with folks I meet up with, so, if you are interested, please seek me out. 🙂 And maybe get me a beer. Heh.

General/Science

Tracing paths in woods nearby

Posted on by charlie

Google EarthI’ve moved to a new neighborhood and there’s a forest nearby. Today, to get a better idea of all the trails, the dog and I wandered every trail we could find. I also has Sports Tracker on to see what a trace of the ramble might reveal.

The resolution of the GPS kept some paths that I walked over more than once from being overlaid, showing two parallel paths.

But, for me, it gives me an idea of all the paths I can walk there.

Innovation/Science/Strategy

Swimming the sea of knowledge (the Concept Web?)

Posted on by charlie

KnewcoI’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about how to find, navigate, recombine, and contribute to … what’s out there, though mostly focused on science and the next generation of science ‘publishing’ (in quotes, since it’ll be quite different from traditional publishing, more back in the hands of the scientists like in the old days).

A friend pointed me to this cool site called WikiProfessional, where they have these cool info navigators. A quick perusal suggests that they focus on the ‘find’ and ‘navigate’, though I think they also have a wee bit of ‘contribute’ through the addition of semantics as you navigate and annotate.

There are a ton of collaborators working on this and I dug a bit deeper into the main one, Knewco, It was on their pages that I stumbled upon the image to the right, about the Knowlet, trademarked, but spot on representing what knowledge really is: a concept with a cloud of facts, co-occurring items, with a few predicted concepts thrown in.

I like.

UPDATE: And here’s a paper that goes into the details.

I like. A lot.

Philosophy/Strategy

The Electric Knife Syndrome

Posted on by charlie

2385188275 E3Cdf33A89I’m at the Mobile 2.0 conference in Barcelona. I was talking with Mark Kramer, and Bryan and Stepanie Rieger about the things we usually talk about. I had mentioned how I was at a conference where the enthusiasm for the ‘technology’ made folks forget to use simpler and better solutions. That led Mark to tell us about his stay in Albania where he saw someone using an electric knife to cut bread at a shop. There was no reason to use the electric knife, a regular knife would have sufficed. Mark suggested that it was using the ultimate tech to be cutting edge.

Another example of this came up later in the discussion. I then realized that we were discussing what could be called the ‘Electric Knife Syndrome‘, where the tech used is subtly inappropriate in relation to existing solutions. This is slightly different from Post-Optimal Objects, where the solution itself is useless. But I think the Electric Knife Syndrome occurs more frequently and we forget a simpler solution is available.

Image from tizzle

Innovation/The Narrative

Live via Mobile is the new Live

Posted on by charlie

When I was a kid, it was a thrill to watch sports live. Up in one corner, there’d bit a big flashing ‘Live – via Satellite’, a distinct differentiator for networks back then.

Now, we’re savvy enough to see if it was broadcast live. Also, networks do the opposite and will label what was normally a live show as ‘re-broadcast of a show recorded on…’

Now the new differentiator is Live with a mobile phone. The videos and audio sent from war zones using satellite phones, the maps of events that update with a stream of notes and photos (writing about the Love the Farm – Leave no Trace, triggered this post), and, of course, the live Qik streams.

Interesting.

Here’s the live map from Glastonbury that we’re using on Nokia Conversations.

Strategy

Twitter is the queen of micro-down

Posted on by charlie

Twitter has been so popular that it finally reached a stage where it was down more  and more frequently (Down is the new Black). But, after a total melt-down, they got their act together and sailed through Apple’s WWDC without a hitch.

Or so they want us to think.

One of their clever solutions is to throttle down various features as things get heavy, features such as pagination, IM, mobile page.

I was wondering how that might work in practice, but now I know.

Instead of all of us suffering with a massive down time, the down time is spread across all of us, micro-down moments, one at a time. And because the micro-down time shows up once in a while to an individual (it goes away to micro-down someone else as you reload), _individual_ perceptions are improved.

So, the Queen of Micro-blogging is also the Queen of Micro-down.

At least this is what it feels like. Is this the case? Does anyone know?

Science/The Narrative

Not only are they doing a good job, but it’s scaringly real

Posted on by charlie

Picture 1-6A while back I found out via the Twitter site that the Mars Phoenix Lander had a Twitter channel. I don’t know, but maybe at the time it didn’t seem to be an interesting stream, what, but I didn’t follow.

Well, seems like Alex is following the Lander and re-tweeted the big news below. So, I went to see the stream and am very pleased with how well they are using the stream. Not only is the person doing the tweeting very funny, but she has been responding to questions and such.

This is an excellent way of using Twitter in a corporate setting.

Did I say corporate? Indeed, this is NASA using Twitter to send out updates for one of their programs. Someone who represents the Lander is the one Tweeting, so that’s marketing communications to me. And companies can learn a lot by just following this stream.

Way to go NASA!

Link: Twitter / MarsPhoenix:

Are you ready to celebrate? Well, get ready: We have ICE!!!!! Yes, ICE, *WATER ICE* on Mars! w00t!!! Best day ever!! about 7 hours ago from web