Elsewhere

I twitter. Look for me there. It’s not often anymore I feel like sitting down to write a blog entry, and am more likely to dump random thoughts into that micro-blog. But not giving this up quite yet, either. The more tools, the more possibilities.

* It’s not about software, it’s about communities.
* We’re heading towards relationship-based computing instead of document-based computing.
* The cognitive dissonance between online and offline identities is dissipating.
* The distinction between different media types is blurring as they converge.
* We can–and should–harness the unique engagement experience of games to help us learn more about the world and our place in it to foster better long-term thinking and behavior. [Will Wright]

Registration at South By Southwest Interactive 2007: $300
New friends and hope for humanity: priceless

Got a Mac with an iTunes library full of unprotected AAC files, and want to play them through your networked TiVo DVR using the TiVo Desktop software?

You can’t. TiVo only plays MP3’s. Unless…

You install the LAME MP3 encoder command-line executable. Then, TiVo Desktop will automatically convert your unprotected AAC files to MP3’s on-the-fly. It works. I just did it

1) Download the Mac OS X installer binaries for LAME from Mac Update.

2) Install it (just keep clicking, it’s all automatic)

3) Open System Preferences, open TiVo Desktop, click to Stop the server, click again to Start it.

Voila. Your TiVo now plays your unprotected AAC files (note, it still won’t play your DRM-protected iTunes Music Store downloads).

Don’t thank me. Thank the folks in the TiVo community forums.

Here I use the term technology in a very broad sense to mean any skill, technique, or body of knowledge which is intellectual rather than instinctual and improves human productivity; for example, language, religion, and agriculture were some of the earliest technologies; internal combustion engines, democracy, computers, psychology, and quantum physics are some more recent examples.

The promise of technology is to give us the tools we need to transcend mere physical survival so we can focus our time and energies on higher purposes (which are, as of yet, undisclosed to us, except in subjective beliefs).

We are in a race against time, however, to improve and refine our technologies to the point where they are indefinitely sustainable. The resource consumption and infrastructure necessary to support our current technologies cannot be sustained — and we are already feeling the negative consequences in very tangible ways (hurricanes, heat waves, etc.).

But this is not to say we should abandon technology; in fact, we couldn’t even if we wanted to. We’re simply wired for it. We passed the point of no return when we developed opposable thumbs. The trick is to advance to the point of sustainability before we burn ourselves up.

What should we be working on to reach true sustainability? Art, spirituality, politics, science, culture? All of the above, of course, because they are all technologies with complex interactions.

Personally, I’ve got a special preference for information systems and digital media because I think it’s the most unique tech of our time with the highest return on investment as it accelerates improvement in all other technologies simultaneously. I also have a penchant for spirituality and personal growth technologies that allow individuals to maximize their positive contributions to the world.

“Life in the so-called space age“, the semi-ironic sub-title of this blog (and lifted from a rather good and underrated album by God Lives Underwater, who apparently lifted the phrase from the booklet of Depeche Mode’s Black Celebration — fun trivia!), reflects this theme of a technology-centric life, working to get us a little closer to technology’s ultimate promise — while trying not to kill ourselves in the process.

IM (a.k.a. IP, Instant Pestering) should be like email, newsgroups, IRC, and the telephone. It shouldn’t matter what client you use, they should all interoperate (and not just the open source flavors, but all of them). And that’s all I have to say about that.

Now that I can finally make some time to blog about South By Southwest Interactive, it feels like yesterday’s news. The blogosphere has already covered it and moved on. Nevertheless, some thoughts:

* The panels, while informative, primarily function to give you things to talk about at the parties and an excuse to chat with the panelists. Networking at the parties is what it’s really all about.

* Not all panels (or keynote speeches) are created alike. I walked out of one panel and almost slept through one of the keynotes (a good blogger does not a good speaker make). But Craig Newmark’s keynote and some of the other panels made up for it.

* Social differentiation, apparently, is human nature. During the web awards, a brief video clip poked fun at a kid whose home video of himself pretending to be a jedi leaked to the Net. A room full of nerds making fun of another nerd. Not cool.

* Overall it was very blog-centric and I guess that’s OK… I was mostly there to get some insight into the business side of the web and meet some cool people, both of which were accomplished, along with some bonus schwag including a CD opener a few guitar picks with dot-com logos printed on them. Schweet!

South By Southwest Interactive was a blast. I’ve got more to say, and will get to it when I can, but first order of business was to follow up on all of the great new contacts. Having taken care of that, I couldn’t resist contacting one of my old professors about what I learned at the “Tagging 2.0″ panel. What follows is a lightly edited version of the email I sent him.

Some recent developments in new web services seem very much like accidental leaps toward a Semantic Web, especially a new feature called “tagging” on services like Flickr and del.icio.us . You’re probably already familiar with this–users label objects with one or more terms that describe or are related to the object, and can also search all users’ labels for terms or keywords to find any objects that anyone else labelled with those terms. Basically, community-created and searchable metadata. Not quite the semantic web, especially since these services are mostly self-contained and independent of each other (there is no universal standard), but it’s definitely a step in that direction.

I just returned from the annual South By Southwest interactive media festival in Austin, Texas, where I attended a panel called “Tagging 2.0″. The panelists were Adina Levin, Prentiss Riddle, Rashmi Sinha, Don Turnbull (University of Texas), and Thomas Vander Wal.

One highlight for me was Sinha’s position that the act of tagging is a natural cognitive process–associating meta-concepts with objects–and should be made as fast, easy, and intuitive as possible for the user, in isolation of other users, in order to maximize the cognitive purity of the metadata and thus improve the aggregate wisdom of the community; and that the “Wisdom of Crowds” is a very real phenomenon, given the right conditions (otherwise it can become mob mentality). Of course this can lead to a very messy universe of non-standard metadata, but, she argued, that is a problem which should be handled during the search stage, with different methods of sorting through the data depending upon the type and context of the search, rather than burdening the user with the cognitive overhead of trying to standardize their associations.

Tagging is especially interesting because it’s a user-generated, bottom-up approach, rather than a top-down approach, which our class determined would be an obstacle to a real semantic web (who’s in charge of creating and standardizing any given folksonomy?). An implemention that follows Sinha’s suggestions also sidesteps the unusual user burden that was another potential obstacle to adoption of metadata tagging.

Thomas Vander Wal presented a graph that represented the three entities–object, metadata, and identity–whose triangular relationship forms the “folksonomy triad” (object-identity=interest; identity-metadata=vocabulary; metadata-object=definition). Adding a fourth entity, community, produces a “dual folksonomy triad” (object-community=culture; metadata-community=terminology; identity-community=affiliation). It went by pretty fast so I’m a little sketchy on understanding this part, but I think the idea is that you need all of these entities and relationships represented in an implementation in order to fully realize a comprehensive, usable system. (Not all web services that use tags currently have all of these features implemented.)

Dr. Turnbull, who is working on an “open source web content classification system”, referred to tagging as “lightweight semantics” which, I think, is a very appropriate term. I had the pleasure of informally chatting with Dr. Turnbull at an afterparty. He’s a very personable guy with an appreciation for how practical information sciences complement more theoretical computer sciences; his department at UT, the School of Information, is separate from the Computer Science department, somewhat reminiscent of the distinction between the UW Computer Science and UWB Computing and Software Systems programs.

Also, You’re It! A Blog On Tagging has a more comprehensive and much more concise summary of the panel session as well as lots of other interesting blog posts about tags.

I compiled these links for a friend to follow-up a conversation tonight and, well, why not share?

A List Apart: Getting started with AJAX
It’s a little technical and assumes some knowledge that I don’t currently have but can probably be inferred from the context.

YubNub
A toy, but a sign of things to come in web interoperability, a.k.a. convergence.

Videntity
Single sign-on and identity management. An old idea that’s still waiting for the right implementation. This is getting closer. (Thanks Dan.)

So I finally meandered over to Google Video tonight and checked out a few of the Popular picks.

I enjoyed it. I might go back. It’s certainly a nice alternative to the ad-spamming mind-numbingness of most TV.

Then I looked for some way to rate the video so I could start building my list of favorites, improve my recommendations, and help other people find it. Failing that, I looked for my recommendations. I looked for the user comments so I could see what kind of discussion the video generated. I looked for the tags so I could find similar videos, or the user profile of the person who uploaded the video for a little more context behind its creation.

None of these things were present (there is a Find Similar feature, but it seems to work from matching keywords in the descriptions, and not very well at that). No community, no social features, no personalization.

In the age of MySpace, Flickr, del.icio.us, blogging/Technorati, Last.fm, Netflix, and even Amazon, people expect social features.

What is Google Video planning to do once Yahoo! gets its video act together? Given Yahoo!’s recent strategic shift toward user-generated content, that seems more likely than ever; in fact a Yahoo! acquisition of YouTube would make quite a bit of sense.

Google’s “math first, questions later” approach is great for search, reference, and utility services, but hamstrings it when it comes to digital media, especially user-generated content.

Of course, I have my own pet theory on what they are really up to… but that’s for another entry.

Preparing to head to Austin next weekend for South by Southwest Interactive. I am so stoked. Having recently committed to re-focusing my career and talents on digital media and social technology (Web 2.0, semantic web, etc.) this is a fantastic way to get a jump start. A big congregation of people who are not only interested in the same things I am, but are out there actually making them happen.

Geek-out, big time. I’m in.

So much to try to learn, to catch up on, to prepare. Climbing up onto the shoulders of giants… and looking for ways that I can contribute–today, next month, next year, next decade. It’s a little overwhelming and exhausting, yet inspiring, energizing and exciting. I think that’s what a good career is supposed to feel like.

Let’s do this. Ping me if you’re gonna be there too, we’ll hook up.