Bear Flag Republic Radio Weblog

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Inventing the Future by Tim O'Reilly

"So, what am I seeing today that I think the world will be writing about (and the venture capitalists and entrepreneurs chasing) in the years to come?

• Wireless...
• Next generation search engines....
• Weblogs....
• Instant messaging....
• File Sharing....
• Grid computing....
• Web spidering....

All of these things come together into what I'm calling "the emergent Internet operating system." The facilities being pioneered by thousands of individual hackers and entrepreneurs will, without question, be integrated into a standardized platform that enables a next generation of applications. (This is the theme of our Emerging Technologies conference in Santa Clara May 13-16, "Building the Internet Operating System.") The question is, who will own that platform?"

I found his discussion of web services interesting, especially in regards to web spiders. My brain is still gel-ling around all of that. This is cool - I've done Tech Summits at SLS about four of the seven topics Tim lists, and our Reference Service covers search engines. Have you ever played that game where you read out loud your fortune from a fortune cookie and add "in bed" to the end of it? If you're a librarian, read tech/visioning articles and add "in libraries" to the end of everything. See if you can apply what you're reading to your current environment.

BTW, the fun version of the fortune cookie game is to add "@ your library" to the end of your fortune.

comments < 7:21:11 PM        >

Canon EOS-1D & D60 images in Sports Illustrated. Rob Galbraith is running an article about two images from Canon's latest Digital SLR's used for double-page spreads in Sports Illustrated. The EOS-1D image taken by David Bergman was shot at ISO 200 in RAW... [Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)]
comments < 7:19:00 PM        >

Using the Google API with Radio and Frontier.
In progress.  [Scripting News]
comments < 7:16:28 PM        >

Google: "With the Google Web APIs service, software developers can query more than 2 billion web documents directly from their own computer programs." Bravo!  [Scripting News]
comments < 7:16:03 PM        >

Three reasons Google Web Services are great (if you don't get this now, you will...):

1) I have a ton storage space (even on my shitty laptop -- also known as MSLT).  I want to get data I think is important down to my desktop (it's a trivial storage issue).  I also have tons of excess horsepower.  Most of my apps chew up less than 5% of my processor's power.  I want this expensive processor to do something or its not worth upgrading (hello Intel!!).  Getting data on a regular basis from Google and other sources uses these resources.  It also, most importantly, allows me to manipulate it locally, using powerful desktop tools.

2) Microsoft, BEA, and IBM (except for Sam Ruby and his work on Axis for Apache) aren't needed to make this happen.  Without the big cos at the center of things, this paradigm scales and takes off.

3) I want to be able to publish the data I get (to my Intranet or the Web).  Radio does that for me.  I can leverage a desktop app that allows me to add annotations to the data I collect.  Imagine this applied to everything that changes often: sales data, inventory data, financial data (both corporate and from someplace like Yahoo finance), and systems data.  I would now have the ability to see the data (in real-time -- hello Vinod!), manipulate it using whatever business process I import as a tool (Radio tools are both easy to build and install -- just drop the tool in a folder), and publish the result. Nice. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]

comments < 7:15:22 PM        >

Hey, Steve - Cory lists some good example uses for the new Google API over at bOing bOing:

"Program Ideas

• Auto-monitor the web for new information on a subject
• Glean market research insights and trends over time
• Invent a catchy online game
• Create a novel UI for searching
• Add Google's spell-checking to an application"

Try the macro yourself using Dave's instructions, and you may start to see it. I did it using "shifted librarian" below, but I could put a "top 10 search for..." box anywhere on my site for any search term I choose.

I'm wondering if we can't somehow add this into Find-It! Illinois, the Virtual Illinois Catalog, and the Illinois Government Information service. Kind of an additional cross-reference section for web-based resources. Andy, what do you think? There's even two Perl interface for this, one from Matt Webb and one from Aaron Cope.  :-)

[The Shifted Librarian]
comments < 7:14:06 PM        >