Searching 2.0 is coming!

I just heard the following from my editor: “We sent the book to press on Tuesday, so it should be off press in the last week of February; I’ll have a more precise date when I receive the printer’s schedule later tomorrow.” So it looks like come March it will finally be available.

I’ll be speaking in Las Vegas next week

Who’s afraid of buttons?

ze frank in The Remnants

The Remnants from John August on Vimeo.

One reason not to get a “home” version of Vista

Turns out that despite the fact that at home I’ve got an x64 quad-core PC with 6GB of RAM I can’t install the Windows 7 beta via Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 because I’ve got Windows Vista Home Premium and Virtual PC won’t run on anything less than Vista Business. :-(

However, I do have Vista Business at the office and I was able to successfully get Windows 7 Beta running via this method.

Amazing online film archive

The National Film Board of Canada has a “new online Screening Room. Here you can watch full-length films, clips and trailers - all free for home viewing.” The site currently contains hundreds of videos from the past 90 years from animated shorts to full-length documentaries. Videos are available in low, medium, and high quality, shareable to several different online social networks and are embeddable. Here’s Between the Laughter, a “This feature-length documentary looks at Stephen O'Keefe, a deaf, stand-up comedian. Faced with the usual challenges that life presents.”

Gorilla Librarian

Word clouds in motion

A video of Nina Simone’s Feeling Good reminded me a a few other of my favorite videos of this type all embedded below. (The third one contains some adult language.) I like to think of these as word clouds in motion; the use of motion in combination with typography to visualize something aural. Enjoy!

Feeling Good, Nina Simone
by mrfnk

With a little additional searching I found that this animation style is actually called kenetic typography and there are plenty more examples on YouTube. That works too ;-)

Inside the Transition: Technology, Innovation and Government

This video was released back on January 16th, but I just watched it last night. There’s nothin’ like someone in government talking about mashups!

Barack O’Bama

2008 Travel Report

I use the social Web site Dopplr to schedule and log my travels and follow the travels of my online friends. This year Dopplr supplied a year-in-review report for all of its members. Here’s mine:

Wazzup 2000 vs. Wazzup 2008

Best Photos of 2008

I posted 7,393 photos to flickr in 2008. Here are the 46 I think are my best of the year.

“Wondrous”

Tad Beckwith of Creative Machines LLC helped put together this sculpture for a library in Arizona which is “quite original and getting some attention” and I would agree. Below is the first video of this artwork available.

More about this work can be found on the library’s and company’s sites.

wiki.whitehouse.gov

In the article “America Online” in the latest issue of Wired (#17.02 which isn’t online yet) I cam across the following paragraph:

The incoming administration is still working to assess the implications of the Presidential Records Act, the post-Nixon legislation requiring the preservation of all White House written communications. But that means that once any page goes up on the White House site, it can’t be altered, only archived and replaced, greatly slowing down the process of modifying and enhancing pages.

So, ok, I understand this and think it’s a good thing. But I instantly thought that this would be the perfect  use for a wiki. Just have Wiki software be the underlying system that ran www.whitehouse.gov and you’d instantly have a traceable record, and archived copy, of every version of the page that’s ever been from day-one forward.

I’d like to think that at least one of the smart people on the transition team had already thought of this but I’ll be submitting it to the folks at www.change.gov just in case they haven’t.

Star Wars retold by someone who hasn't seen it

from Joe Nicolosi on Vimeo.

The 3 Rules of the Internet

Contains mild adult language. Via BoingBoing.

History of the Internet

History of the Internet from PICOL on Vimeo.

Reference 2008: It's not just about having a big dictionary any more

Click to Play

Presented at PALS Day, Starved Rock State Park, Illinois, 7 May 2008

Matt Smith is the new Dr. John Smith

Read the BBC Press Release. And, yes, I've actually seen a previous performance of his, but at first did not recognize the name.

Keen meets Godwin

Andrew Keene is the author of The Cult of the Amateur and someone who is convinced that Web 2.0 is leading to the end of civilization as we know it.

(Mike) Godwin's Law: "As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one."

Keene's recent article in The Daily Beast:

Imagine if today’s radically unregulated Internet, with its absence of fact checkers and editorial gatekeepers, had existed back then. Imagine that universal broadband had been available to enable the unemployed to read the latest conspiracy theories about the Great Crash on the blogosphere. Imagine the FDR-baiting, Hitler-loving Father Charles Coughlin, equipped with his “personalized” YouTube channel, able, at a click of a button, to distribute his racist message to the suffering masses. Or imagine a marketing genius like the Nazi chief propagandist Josef Goebbels managing a viral social network of anti-Semites which could coordinate local meet-ups to assault Jews and Communists.

Mr. Keen, please, please go away your arguments have officially lost any merit due to Reductio ad Hitlerum.

2008 Reading Retrospective

It looks like I didn’t get all that close to my average 130 book this year. Oh well, it’s been a busy year and in order to have an “average” you need to have some numbers lower than that average. Anyway, here’s my 2008 reading stats:

Books: 107
Fiction: 76
Non-fiction: 31
Print: 76
Graphic Novels: 12
Audiobooks: 17
eBooks: 2
Total pages: 23810
Male authors: 105
Female authors: 16