Saturday, May 04, 2002

Modern Boys and Mobile Girls By William Gibson "'Why Japan?' I've been asked for the past 20 years or so. Meaning: why has Japan been the setting for so much of my fiction? When I started writing about Japan, I'd answer by suggesting that Japan was about to become a very central, very important place in terms of the global economy. And it did. (Or rather, it already had, but most people hadn't noticed yet.) A little later, asked the same question, I'd say that it was Japan's turn to be the centre of the world, the place to which all roads lead; Japan was where the money was and the deal was done. Today, with the glory years of the bubble long gone, I'm still asked the same question, in exactly the same quizzical tone: 'Why Japan?' Because Japan is the global imagination's default setting for the future. The Japanese seem to the rest of us to live several measurable clicks down the time line. The Japanese are the ultimate Early Adaptors, and the sort of fiction I write behoves me to pay serious heed to that. If you believe, as I do, that all cultural change is essentially technologically driven, you pay attention to the Japanese. They've been doing it for more than a century now, and they really do have a head start on the rest of us, if only in terms of what we used to call 'future shock' (but which is now simply the one constant in all our lives).... We are all curators, in the post-modern world, whether we want to be or not." [Guardian Unlimited, snowdeal.org | conflux] I'm still not completely sure what the point of this article is, but I especially like the quote about all of us being curators. I also want to put in a plug for Eric Snowdeal's site. If you're not reading or subscribed to it, you should be. Every couple of days, he senses a major issue coming to the forefront and collects a series of relevant and interesting articles that provide full context for the issue. Recent topics have included technology and education, deep linking, cyberwar, and the change from free to fee services. It's like having your own company librarian who spots trends and provides background. Those with aggregators can grab his feed here. 9:59:18 PM  Permanent link here

Point, Click & Wow!: A Quick Guide to Brilliant Laptop Presentations "Point, Click & Wow! is comprehensive, practical and full of examples as well as stories and observations contributed by over a hundred other presentation experts. Here is a comment that I agree with thoroughly: 'The average presenter flashes PowerPoint on the screen and then delivers a message. That's not good enough. The new generation of audiences grew up watching MTV, eating Taco Bell, and using the Playstation as entertainment and a way to sleep. They will be BORED with headers, bullets, text, and corner graphics. Keep them interested with DV clips, gif animations, and interesting sounds. BUT don't put them there just because you can--make them fit with the message....' The book is reasonably priced at $19.95. Caveat: Some online vendors are still marketing the first edition. Make sure you get the more current New and Revised Edition, Second edition, 2002. I find it remarkable that our culture is saturated with visual forms of communication (TV, movies, videos, computer games and graphics in print) yet most people are "visually illiterate" and visual communication is rarely taught in school. Point, Click & Wow! is valuable because it bundles the entire presentation process, including graphics, into a simple step by step procedure...." [LLRX.com] If we don't buy this book at work, I'm going to get it for myself. I'm torn on the whole Powerpoint issue because on the one hand, the kinds of talks I give require good, well-paced visuals in order to avoid glazed looks. On the other hand, most of my audience isn't ready for all of the bells and whistles mentioned above. Although I don't have a compatible handheld, I think using a PDA with Margi would be a wonderful way to prove the technology and show its potential. 9:33:27 PM  Permanent link here

I've had a suggestion to explore the use of Heads, Decks, and Leads as explained by Jon Udell in conjunction with truncating my RSS feeds. I certainly can see the value in this (my undergraduate degree is in journalism), but now I have a concern about doing this. Rather than using descriptive titles for my posts, I've been using the title of the article to which I am referring along with a direct link to it. My rationale has been that a reader might click on it to go to the original material, but doing this also populates the "Google It" link at the bottom of each post. If the original link has been removed, my theory is that you could click on "Google It" to try and find a cached copy. It wouldn't work for generic headlines, but it should for more unique ones, so I've included titles when I think this would be valuable. So my question is this: if I'm correct in this assumption, should I continue doing this as a service for all of my readers (present and future), or should I change my policy and use descriptive titles for those reading my site in a news aggregator. In a way, it's a debate between currency and archiving, but they both have merit. What do you think? What would be most valuable for you? 10:29:24 AM  Permanent link here

Tag It "The Internet revolution was about people connecting with people. The next revolution will be about things connecting with things. And it's taking shape in pockets around the globe. For the first time, big companies such as Wal-Mart, Gillette and Procter & Gamble are joining to give the technology serious momentum. In a twist, this next technological chapter won't emerge out of ever-more-powerful computers and faster Internet connections. This shift comes from the opposite direction. It will ride on pieces of plastic the size of postage stamps, costing a nickel or less. Each plastic tag will contain a computer chip, which can store a small amount of information, and a minuscule antenna that lets the chip communicate with a network.... Those tags will someday be on everything — egg cartons, eyeglasses, books, toys, trucks, money and so on. All those items will be able to wirelessly connect to networks or the Internet, sending information to computers, home appliances or other electronic devices. Grocery items will tell the store what needs to be restocked and which items are past their expiration dates. The groceries will check themselves out in a split second as you push a full cart past a reader. A wine lover could look on a computer screen and see what's in her wine cellar. Prescription drug bottles could work together to send you a warning if the combination of pills you're about to swallow would be toxic.... The technology doesn't really have a handy name. The tags are known as radio frequency identification tags, or RFID. The Auto-ID center calls the core of its standard "ePC," which stands for Electronic Product Code. Perhaps an appropriate umbrella name might be tinyband.... Singapore relies on the technology to control traffic. Its system, called Electronic Road Pricing, or ERP, charges different prices to drive on different roads at different times. Driving on one main artery between 8:30 a.m. and 9 a.m. costs $3 (in Singapore dollars — about $1.60 in U.S. currency) but is free from 2 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. The pricing encourages drivers to stay off busy roads at busy times. Every car must have an RFID tag, and it communicates with readers along every major road. The road readers identify each car and send the information to a central computer, which adds up the car owners' bills.... The real fun will start once the price of a tag gets down to around a penny. Then adding a tag would be no more expensive than stamping a bar code on a product. Bar codes today are on nearly every item made for consumers and business. Imagine that every one of those things will have a small amount of intelligence and ability to communicate. The world around us would almost come alive.... You lose your eyeglasses. They've fallen under the family room couch. The tag on the eyeglasses connects with a reader in the family room — readers would be all around a house. The reader is also getting signals from everything else in the room. Tags work a little like radar. A reader sends out a signal looking for tags. The signal excites the tag — the tag itself has no power —and causes it to return a signal containing its information. This request and return of a signal happens more than 100 times a second for each tag. The reader pipes its information across a wireless network and dumps it into the home computer. The computer looks at the data and deduces that the signal from the glasses takes the same amount of time to hit the reader as the signal from the couch. You sit at the computer and type in a search box: 'Where are my eyeglasses?' The computer spits back: 'Under the couch.' " [Cincinnati.com, via Slashdot] [Emphasis above is mine.] I'm putting tags on my keys and remote controls first. I know Teri thinks a combination of GPS and wireless can help patrons navigate a library, but this seems like another possibility for tinyband as well. Perhaps a patron uses the catalog to search for a specific title. It shows on shelf and sends out an automatic query asking where the book is located. A map displays on the screen, showing its location and providing directions. The patron could either print out the map or beam it to their handheld (PDA, cell phone, or OQO-like device). Either way, this would certainly help locate mis-shelved items! Lots of interesting possibilities.... 10:15:11 AM  Permanent link here

For Andy and Bruce: "Conspiracy_Of_Doves writes 'Gamespot has an article about the new Tron 2.0 game in the works to accompany the movie. It looks like they are being very true to the original, the new light cycles are even being designed by Syd Mead, the same guy who designed the old ones. You will get to visit locations from the movie, as well as play around inside desktops and PDAs.' IGN has another article on the game. Watch out for the gridbugs. " [Slashdot] 10:01:40 AM  Permanent link here