Neil Finlayson: Fusion Weblog

Sun, 11 May 2003 12:35:15 GMT

Expertise Logs

Starting weblogs at universities.

Here's how you get weblogs started at a university like Harvard or Dartmouth. First, know that universities thrive on having their experts visible outside the university. Not just publishing in academic journals, which most alumni don't read, but being called in as experts on radio talk shows, esp NPR. That's how you reach into their wallets, show them why they should be proud of their alma mater. That gets the money flowing.

So how do you get your professors on the radar, as acknowledged experts who can communicate to everyday people? With a weblog of course. And then realize that I need experts to turn to just like the radio guys do. So there's lots of value in staking out the still largely virgin territory of expertise flowing through weblogs. This was one of the key epiphanies at the dinner we had last night. But that's not all.

Dartmouth is in a special position to flow information to and from the rest of the world about the New Hampshire primary. Student volunteers (aka interns) can train the people to use the software, and read what they write and find the nuggets for the rest of us. At least one big professional news organization, a TV network, has bitten, after my Crimson op-ed. They might trivialize the NH weblogs, maybe they won't -- but we can use a great university "on the ground" at ground zero of the US electoral process early next year.
[Scripting News]

Thu, 20 Feb 2003 11:19:01 GMT

FUSION WESTERNISLES LAUNCH IN LINUX CENTRE, NESS

We had a superb inaugural meeting of Fusion Western Isles in the Ness Linux Centre last night. Thanks to Malcolm Macsween, Donnie and Angela for organizing such a great event.

And thanks too to Bruce Morrison and our guest speaker David Mackenzie for an absolutely spellbinding trawl through the key technology trends of our times.

David is a recently retired director of IBM and he's on a immensely exciting mission to make the Highlands and Islands the new Austin. Jim Hunter of HIE also talks of the potential of the new Seattle, mostly because the Pacific Northwest is as wet as the Atlantic Northwest!

A mission overall that many of us have been pursuing for a wee while and one that now really looks like its got momentum. Technology and mountains! And beaches, cliffs, sailing. And a cinema hopefully!! And a wonderful pub on the UHI Lews Castle Collge campus. You can't have a University or a high-tech sector without a great hangout!! This of course applies to Inverness too - use that big river Ness more effectively people!! Y' need a 6th Street, a Temple Bar.

BTW check out Richard Florida on what distinguishes the new technology growth areas worldwide: amentity, diversity and tolerance are absolutely key ... and you need a great university too.

Tue, 18 Feb 2003 10:13:59 GMT

Everest WiFi

High hopes for Everest cybercafe. The world's highest internet facility is planned for Everest base camp, with proceeds going to help clean up after thousands of climbers. [BBC News | Technology | UK Edition]

Tue, 18 Feb 2003 10:05:10 GMT

Demo for Chris

This is a test post

Mon, 17 Feb 2003 08:13:26 GMT

Weblogs Are Go

Google Deal Ties Company to Weblogs. Google has bought Pyra Labs, the creator of software for publishing Weblogs, which is a form of hyperlinked online journal. By Amy Harmon. [New York Times: Technology]

Sun, 16 Feb 2003 11:39:24 GMT

Google buys Blogger - Weblogs Go Mainstream

These times are starting to feel historic. Yesterday was the day the world turned. To collective intelligence ...

"Live from the Blogosphere" instant-replay. (1) Right in the middle of the panel discussion, Ev gets a call on his cellphone and announces live for the first time in public -- in person, and by way of his blog -- that Google bought Blogger (specifically, Pyra Labs, the makers of Blogger).
(2) Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap.
(3) Also for the first time publicly, during the panel discussion Ev and Noah Glass demo Audblog, a new service that allows you to "call in" a post to your weblog via mobile phone. Your speech, or the ambient sounds around you, are recorded and transmitted to your blog by way of your cellphone. Like magic, the demo is delightfully simple and actually works.
(4) A couple hundred or so geeks, writers, and webloggers from near and far show up, wearing "Hello My Blog's Name is:" stickers, and blogging throughout the event via hiptops and WiFi-enabled laptops. Lots of bloggers who'd only known each others' work online met each other in person for the first time. This is extremely cool, and really fun to witness. The crowd overflows out of the packed gallery, into Chung King Road; attendees outside who are standing too far away from the gallery doors to hear the panelists clearly just whip out their laptops and crank up the live Shoutcast audio stream. This is insane. And somehow, it works.
(4) Doc Searls, Heather Havrilesky, Mark Frauenfelder, Tony Pierce , Susannah Breslin, and Ev roll up their sleeves and deconstruct the blogosphere with the overflow crowd. They disagree on plenty, but agree that this is the year that weblogs will hit the mainstream. For-profit blogs and commercial blogging services start now. How this will transform what we know as egalitarian, anarchic, grassroots blogging culture -- and mainstream media -- remains to be seen. At the end of an historic day when millions of people worldwide took free speech to the streets, it seems particularly fitting to be exploring the power and impact of cheap, instant, easy online publishing.
(5) Somehow, SOCALWUG's wireless LAN, the audio stream, and the video stream all work. Archived streams of audio and video will be available soon, and I'll post links here as soon as they are.
(6) John Von Seggern from digitalcutuplounge.com delivers a smokin' Asian-fusion DJ set from laptops -- and debuts a new mash-up we'll post here later this week.
(7) Everyone rolls down Chung King Road to a smoky, crusty, 61-year-old Chinatown dive bar for real-time streaming beer and live wireless conversation. Life is good.
Discuss [Boing Boing Blog]

Sat, 15 Feb 2003 15:51:14 GMT

People Love This Tool

Groove 2.5.

Team blogging
Groove founder Ray Ozzie and his teams have always pretended to build application software. But what they have actually delivered are the operating systems of the future -- years ahead of schedule. The XML business Web is only now achieving the architecture that Lotus Notes laid down 15 years ago: message-oriented exchange of semi-structured documents. As today's operating systems catch up with that paradigm, Ozzie is tackling the next set of challenges in Groove: drop-dead simple secure collaboration, presence management, coordination of user and device identities, and ad-hoc group group formation. [Full story at InfoWorld.com.]

The scenario shown in the screenshot uses Tim Knip's Groove interop tool -- a Radio UserLand add-in based on Groove Web Services -- to create a genuinely new experience of team blogging. Until now, team blogging has meant that a group of folks post to a common weblog. This setup does that too, but it also does something I find much more powerful -- it synchronizes the inputs to the collaborative process, as well as the output. In this case, the input is the combined set of RSS feeds subscribed to by the members of the shared space. Everyone knows that everyone else is seeing the same feeds. Discussion can grow around items in those feeds, and can take various forms: replies to the forum that receives the feeds, IM-style text chat, Roger Wilco-style voice chat. ... [Jon's Radio]

Tue, 04 Feb 2003 22:56:11 GMT

Groove 2.5

News.Com: "Groove Networks on Tuesday released a revamped version of its collaboration software that ties the company closer to Microsoft and introduces compliance with Web services." [Scripting News]

Tue, 04 Feb 2003 11:58:55 GMT

My Weblog is in the Highlands

Today I'm making it my mission to mention weblogs to some key people in the Highlands and Islands ... hey Jim come on in the water's lovely!

This is the New New Journalism!! We need to read your writing ...

Can weblogs make the Highlands and Islands a better place? Yeah I would say so.

because communicating is what we need to do, as Malky would say
because official messages are so dry - see Mysterian, see HIE, see Comhairle nan Eilean, see Amec - all dry
because official messages are only a fraction of the real story
because language is generative:
- we can say something that has never been said before and have it understood. We can create new expressions to relate to new ideas
because we need to discuss things - is A Pattern Language an ur-text for the Highlands and Islands? a must read for everyone who plans?
- An ordinary language like English is a system which allows us to create an infinite variety of one dimensional combinations of words, called sentences. ... A pattern language is a system which allows its users to create an infinite variety of those three dimensional combinations of patterns which we call buildings, gardens, towns. Christopher Alexander
because we're connected by this mesh

Fri, 31 Jan 2003 13:34:33 GMT

Bent protein

Researchers Report Promising Treatment for 2 Heart Ailments. For the first time, researchers have found a way to treat two deadly heart ailments that are caused by a protein that folds into an abnormal shape. By Sandra Blakeslee. [New York Times: Health]

Thu, 30 Jan 2003 14:51:27 GMT

So is Science

Espoo Science Park Generates Success Stories

A know-how concentration generating new companies has been created at Otaniemi in Espoo, Finland during the past decade. The strong areas of the Science Park are the software businesses and information technology. The business idea of the technology centre is to help new state-of-the-art business activities to start, grow and internationalize. The number of companies has risen to 400 and every year almost one hundred new ones are created.

Thu, 30 Jan 2003 14:42:50 GMT

Finland is cool

To see why check this out.

Thu, 30 Jan 2003 14:37:43 GMT

802 Fever

Detroit Students To Get Wireless iBooks : The 80 sixth-graders at Detroit's Malcolm X Academy are more eager than usual to head to school these days. So is teacher Jeffrey Robinson. (Mike Wendland via MyAppleMenu) [MyAppleMenu]

Thu, 30 Jan 2003 14:36:46 GMT

Blogs target business

Business targets the blogs. Online: As business begins to cash in on weblogs, Jim McClellan reports on those creating bucks and buzz from the online craze. [Guardian Unlimited]

Thu, 30 Jan 2003 14:22:40 GMT

Fusion Weblog

Mysterian is actively taking part in Bruce Morrison's excellent Fusion initiative. I'm setting up a Fusion Western Isles weblog and its temporary home is here. Later we will site it at the oh-so-vital University of the Highlands and Islands, at the Lews Castle College.

Some of our members include

UHI Lews Castle College

Alasdair Macleod
George Banks

ReefNet

Alex Matheson
Alex Tearse

WIE, Connected Communities and WorkGlobal

Donnie Morrison
Mairi Thomson

Western Isles Health Board

Eddy Yates
Jon Harris

Mysterian

Forrest Duncan
Malky Burns
Neil Finlayson

EMCUK

Malcolm MacSween

Thu, 30 Jan 2003 14:02:18 GMT

Lets make the Highlands and Islands hot

BBC: "A total of 27 new sites will be opened at Welcome Break service stations, while 36 Hilton hotels will offer hotspots in their lobbies. Business travellers will also be able to log on at Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted and Aberdeen airports." [Scripting News]

Thu, 30 Jan 2003 13:58:55 GMT

And the mission is ...

From the home website: FUSION is a membership, not for profit organisation that is home for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), researchers and inventors, and all those professional service providers involved in the challenging and exciting task of innovation. Our mission is to help the Highlands & Islands of Scotland turn ideas into commercial reality, through a dynamic network of people and organisations. Many networking organisations around the world have emerged from world class research institutions to commercialise the latest research ideas.

Thu, 30 Jan 2003 13:56:44 GMT

Fusion Weblog

I'm going to use this area to trial the Fusion Weblog. I'll try and route material relevant to the mission in here ... At the moment only I can post - if George and co at UHI Lews can set Radio up we should all be able to post and route news ...