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Wednesday, January 21, 2004 |
Walking Through History. Tag and Scan
"Tag and Scan is another location based service, somewhat similar to Urban Tapestries and Dodgeball.
With Tag and Scan, users can tag geographic places (in London) with
pictures and text for other users to find when they do a scan of that
area. The application can be downloaded and installed on any Java
capable mobile, and users buy credits to spend on tagging and scanning.
I'm really hot for this idea, and have been for awhile. To me it's a
kind of digital graffiti that enables people to be even more informed
while mobile -an evolutionary milestone I call Hi-Fidelity Nomad.
Because we will depend on handheld devices to find this information, I
sometimes call these devices Digital Divining Rods." [Cool Hunting]
I'm intrigued by these types of applications and what libraries
could do with them. Specifically, it would be an interesting new format
for our digitized history collections. Dang, I need another guinea pig
in SLS.... [The Shifted Librarian] 
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Libraries and the Coming Age of Video. Our Everyday, Everywhere Exposure to Video
"Digital video is starting to have profound implications for the way humans absorb information, interact and communicate.
Are we entering a post-literate society? How does the presence of
screens with moving images just about everywhere affect our behavior?
Is Big Brother watching us, or does it just feel that way?...
Consider, however, Deja View's Camwear, to my mind the 'killer app'
of CES this year. A tiny camera clips onto your glasses, hat or shirt
pocket. It's attached by a thin cord (which you can run inside your
shirt or top) to a camcorder that, because it uses flash storage and
has no display, is about the size and weight of a deck of cards. Here's the concept: Camwear records everything you do, but
doesn't store it anywhere until you tell it to, and then only in
30-second clips (16 on an included 64 megabyte memory card, but it
accepts up to a 512 MB card). But the key is this: You get to decide after the fact if
something's worth keeping — and then capture it — rather than recording
everything and having to go back and view and edit hours of video.
For longer clips you can 'daisy-chain' 30-second segments
(although you'll miss about 1.5 seconds of action in between). Battery
life is around four hours. It uses state-of-the-art MPEG-4 formatting
and works with a PC, Mac, TV and related display devices.
Beyond the obvious 'America's Funniest Home Videos'
application, Camwear has a host of intriguing uses. Consider the ATM
that doesn't give you your cash. Or the salesperson who changes the
deal on you. Or playing back the earthquake or car crash to the
insurance agent. It's your life as Reality TV....
Then there's our quality of life and self-concept as human
beings. If the camera is always on us and our surroundings, what does
that do to our sense of privacy, security and individuality?...." [Seattle Times, via JD's New Media Musings]
On the one hand, that's a pretty scary world to think about living
in. On the other hand, I really-really-really want one of these things!
Parents know how many times you wish you had a video recorder handy
when the kids say something particularly funny or just work their
kid-like charm.
I've mentioned here before that libraries need to start consider
cameraphones in their policies, and this opens a whole new can of worms
to the mix. It's not that cameraphones in and of themselves are so bad,
and you certainly can't ban them. They're not terribly unique -- anyone
could walk into your library with a 35mm camera tomorrow and start
snapping pictures -- but their approaching ubiquity brings with them
new issues.
However libraries have a myriad of policies governing appropriate
behavior in these very public places, many of which are designed to
maintain patron privacy. One of these days, someone is going to walk
into a library and be obvious about taking pictures of people with
their phone, even uploading them to the internet on the spot. It's
better to be proactive and discuss how to handle this type of situation
when it comes up, rather than have your surprised staff be reactive and
make a bad situation worse.
And hey, it's better to talk about this stuff now, before everyone has a Deja View Camwear. [The Shifted Librarian]
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Kinzan, Model View Controller. Garland Wong, the CTO of Kinzan, came to see me today.
After walking him to my office, he unfolded his laptop, and started
showing me a demo of what he and his team has been working on for a few
years.
But wait, what the heck was he showing me? He opened up Eclipse. And started showing me how his IDE and components let
developers build apps quickly with no code. All in Java. Uses
Model-View-Controller methodology. He built a web application in front
of me that hooked into SAP. Then he showed how it easy it was to switch
the site to use Siebel. And change the functionality of the app itself.
"Why is he showing me this?" I started asking myself. After all, I
+do+ work at Microsoft and this was all running on open source and Java
stuff.
But, I had to admit it was cool. I'd never seen a coding environment
that was like this. Just plop a component down on the screen. Draw a
line to connect it into the system. No code.
Then the shocker. He closed down Eclipse, opened up Visual Studio and did the same thing.
Only this time his system used Visio inside of Visual Studio. He showed
me the code it wrote. Showed me the XML file it created. And how it
enabled a new kind of development team.
"Is this interesting?" he asked.
[expletive] yes!!
Keep in mind, this system is aimed at large companies. $25k just to
buy the system, and then $1k per developer machine. But, his system has
the potential to change corporate development as much as Visual Basic
changed it.
It's something you need to see work. It's one of those things that a post on a weblog just won't do justice.
Have any of you seen this system? What do you think?
One other disclaimer. The Java part of the system is out today. The .NET part is still being worked on. [The Scobleizer -- Geek Aggregator]
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No writer is an island - techcomms and marcoms 10 years from now. I was inspired by tonight's combined STC/HTCE event
on "The value of integrating technical and marketing communications"
(sorry no link but I doubt the link on the HTCE site will last more
than a month) to think about how technical writing and marketing
communications will be changed by instant, networked publishing like
blogs and wikis.
I think that in 10 years time:
- There will still be writers: both for technical writing and marketing communications.
- However, writers will not be an island. Like software developers
today, a lot of writers write their online help, user manuals etc. in a
kind of big bang "waterfall" non-iterative process, publish them to
paper (or ship the software) and then get no feedback and don't have
conversations with real users about their manuals (today only the poor
support team has this!). In 10 years time, I believe both writer and
software developers will be more transparent and their development
process will be much more iterative, much more open and transparent and
they will be responsible for monitoring user feedback on the web from
real customers (using sophisticated searching and filtering tools much
better than today's Google) and incorporating it into the docs.
- Documentation
will still be done in paper form, but it will also be increasingly done
online and in fact a lot of documentation will only exist online.
- The publication cycle, like the product development
cycle, will be greatly shortened. Today there's a large time lag
between writing and release to the web and print. We won't have that
luxury in the future. Simultaneous and quick publication to the web
will be the norm. The web won't be an afterthought.
- Most products will have a blog or wiki like component as part of
their web presence. It will contain the official documents as well as
unofficial documents (such as FAQs and docs about uses for the product
that the development team never thought of) developed iteratively in
co-operation with power users and lead customers.
[Roland Tanglao's Weblog]
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Age. NASA
confirmed Hubble's fate over the weekend, with chief scientist John
Grunsfeld saying: "This is a sad day . . . (but) the best thing for the
space community." NOTE: It is indeed sad and hardly what is best for the space community. [John Robb's Weblog]
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Jon Udell on easy RSS subscribing. Jon Udell: What RSS users want: consistent one-click subscription.
I agree with Jon, which is why I added feed-scheme support to
NetNewsWire. Other newsreaders already support this method, with more
to come.
But before this becomes truly useful, three things are needed:
1. There isn’t a standard graphic yet. There should be something that’s as much a standard as the orange XML graphic.
 I asked Bryan Bell
to make a graphic that says FEED, since it’s the feed URL scheme. But
then it was suggested it really should say SUBSCRIBE, so it’s more
clear what you’re doing. But then that would make the button quite a
bit larger, out-of-step with other buttons... and there I set it aside
for a while.
A standard graphic is still needed.
2. More newsreaders need to support this. Though a bunch do, with more
on the way, they’ve not all announced support for this convention.
Philippe Martin added an important piece of the puzzle (on OS X) by
adding an easy way to set your default newsreader by using his free IC-Switch app.
If you’re an OS X developer, and you have questions about how to
support the feed URL scheme, I’ll be happy to answer your questions.
3. People with websites need to know about the convention. People who
create default templates for weblog publishing systems need to know
about it. This is straightforward evangelism: explain the benefits of
it, give people a cool graphic and an easy howto, and ask them to add
it. [inessential.com]
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Kan Do. KanGuard
"Kansas has provided a model for all libraries to follow. Using open
source products, Linux and Squidgauard, they are providing free
filtering to all public libraries for a narrowly defined collection of
websites that a group of librarians believes must be blocked in order
to comply with CIPA.
Here's the link: http://skyways.lib.ks.us/KSL/libtech/kanguard
This was a result of some creative software engineers and the support of the State Library.
Hooray for Kansas for getting it right!" [Galeciablog]
This is what I wanted to see happen in Illinois or at least at the
system level. No go, though. Everyone is too busy reinventing their own
wheels. [The Shifted Librarian]
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Money. Nice overview of Kerry's and Edwards' views on tax policy. Really like Edwards' detailed program. [John Robb's Weblog]
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© Copyright 2004 William J. Maya.
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