March 2008
links for 2008-03-01
Lifestreaming Comes to Yahoo! with MyBlogLog Overhaul - ReadWriteWeb Marshall doesn’t love MyBlogLog’s lifestreaming: “MyBlogLog still has a ways to go before it can be as good a lifestreaming service as several others available…” (tags: mybloglog, lifestream, yahoo, friendfeed)
Top 10 Worst Captchas | John M Willis ESM Blog Priceless (tags: captchas humor)
...
February 2008
QR Code For /Message
Reston: I have bumped into this odd square pixelated graphic on a few blogs recently, and I didn’t know what it was until now.
It’s a Quick Response (QR) code, designed to work with camera phones that have a QR reader installed.
Here’s the QR code for /Message, generated by the folks at Kaywa:
QR-Code Generator, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.
Here’s a cartoon to...
To-Do Tattoos: Lists At Your Fingertips
Reston: I stumbled on Geekologie somehow, and saw this. I thought I would have to pass it along for all the getting things done types out there. It’s a temporary tattoo that puts some lines on your hand so you can write to-dos neatly on your flesh.
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Tweets From The Tweetup Presentation
Here’s the stream on Twitter from my Tweetup presentation (see Thoughts For Tonight’s Tweetup)
@stoweboyd: People feel like they really miss someone if they don’t twitter as regularly as they usually do. acarvin at 29-02-2008 02:00
@stoweboyd was No 3 most traveled on dopplr shashib at 29-02-2008 01:57
@stoweboyd is arguing that tools like twitter allow people...
Subprime Primer
Reston: Priceless!
Subprime Primer
subprime works, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.
Dan Hill on The Street As Platform
Reston:
[from The Street As Platform, excerpted by Urbansheep]
We can’t see how the street is immersed in a twitching, pulsing cloud of data. This is over and above the well-established electromagnetic radiation, crackles of static, radio waves conveying radio and television broadcasts in digital and analogue forms, police voice traffic. This is a new kind of data, collective and...
Thoughts For Tonight's Tweetup
Reston: I am attending the aptly named MD/DC/VA Tweetup tonight (which is apparently meeting in a new location, for you oldtimers).
I am nominally on the roster as ‘The Stowe Boyd’ and it says that I will chat with the other twitterers…. but about what?
I guess I will dither a bit on Twitter as a flow application, and where I think that is leading us.
But I also thought I...
Blogging In The Bathtub
I am practicing with my Nokia 810 device by blogging in the bathtub. It’s an experiment in anticipation of SXSW where I plan to leave my laptop behind in my hotel and only bring the 810 along.
Map It: Reston VA
links for 2008-02-28
Air Travel | Brad Ideas Brad Templeton wants ‘people pods’ that could be slid into airplanes like tractor trailer cars are hoisted into boats or trains. I had this idea eons ago, but not to make the travel experience better for people, just more efficient for the airlines. (tags: lufthansa travel contest DLD)
BuzzMachine » Blog Archive » The social flight Jeff wonders...
Optimizing Boarding
Reston: Matt Biddulph turned me onto Sept 09 article in Wired about better boarding algorithms for airlines, and it seems my hunch for what is called reverse pyramid — boarding window seats and middle seats in the back, then window seats and middle seats in the middle, and aisle seats in the back, leading to the aisle seats in the front being filled last — is likely the best:
...
The Summit Keynote
Reston: Esther is going to invest in Dopplr, because sociality changes the way that advertising works:
[from The Coming Ad Revolution - WSJ.com by Esther Dyson]
[…]
Each user determines who will get into his own garden, whether friends or vendors. Look at Dopplr (where I plan to become an investor), a site for travelers. I list my trips, and see how they intersect with my...
Starbucks Promises Customers Perfection
Reston: The problem is obvious: brand dilution.
[Starbucks Promises Customers Perfection: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance]
A day after shutting down most of its U.S. shops for three hours to retrain baristas on espresso basics, Starbucks is welcoming customers back Wednesday with a new promise posted in stores: “Your drink should be perfect, every time. If not, let us know and...
US Airways Flies In The Wrong Direction
Reston: Apropos of my earlier post today about Better Air Travel, I got an email today from US Airways, doing exactly the wrong thing:
[via email]
Second Checked Bag Policy Change
Today, US Airways announced a change to our baggage policy. Beginning May 5, 2008, we’ll charge $25 for a second checked bag. The new fee applies to travel on or after May 5 for tickets purchased on or after...
TweetVolume
Reston: I really don’t know if I should believe that I am getting more mentions that McCain on Twitter, as the Tweetvolume tool suggests. Has to be a bug, or else I should be running for office.
TweetVolume : Home, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.
Better Air Travel
Reston: I am inspired by Jeff Jarvis’ noble (but failed, I think) attempt to explore his notions of the Social Flight as a means of improving the air travel experience.
I travel a great deal (my last trip was SF>Lausanne>New Delhi>Barcelona>Lugano>Lausanne>NYC>DC, for example) and while I am an avid student of social technologies, I don’t believe that a deeper...
links for 2008-02-27
California: No Candidacy for Internet Scholar - New York Times Lessig decides not to run for congress, alas. (tags: larry+lessig politics congress)
Musing about Social Objects: Molluscs that Matter | confused of calcutta JP Rangaswami explains why social objects matter (tags: jp+rangaswami social+objects hugh+macleod)
Sam Lawrence Tags Some People
Reston: Sam has an interesting post, with Many Eyes tag clouds of various folks he likes to read. Including me.
Others featured are Robert Scoble, Hugh McLeod, Dennis Howlett, Jeremiah Owyang, Andrew McAfee, J.P. Rangaswami, Shel Israel, Chris Brogan, and Chuck Hollis. Oh, and himself. (No women, Sam?)
SHIFD
SHIFD - Dashboard, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.
Clinton Goes Negative In Final Days
Reston: I think Clinton’s eleventh hour attack spree will backfire because people will see it as a desperate act, and one that is counter to the sentiments she outlined at the last debate.
[from Clinton Campaign Starts 5-Point Attack on Obama - New York Times by PATRICK HEALY and JULIE BOSMAN]
“There’s a general rule in politics: A legitimate distinction which could be effective when...
links for 2008-02-26
Microsoft Announces Engagement Mapping ROI Black Box, Technology Companies Taking Over Advertising Industry - Publishing 2.0 Scott Karp on Microsoft’s newest attempt — surprise! — to take on Google in online advertising. (tags: microsoft google google+adsense engagement+mapping)
Wish I Was In SF Today...
Reston:
[via email from the Long Now Foundation]
Subject: Joining 3.5 Billion Years of Microbial Invention: Craig Venter at Long Now tonight
Monday, February 25, 02008 Craig Venter
With his current series of breakthroughs in synthetic biology Craig Venter and his team are not so much creating life as joining life. Reverse-engineering evolution’s long-refined tricks and subtleties at ...
links for 2008-02-25
VMC #28 - Stowe Boyd : VMC - Vascellari Media Channel Andrea Vascellari interviewed me in Berlin at the Web 2.0 Expo. Same old bilge about social tools, the individual at the center of the web. (tags: andrea+vascellari web+2.0+expo+berlin+08 web2.0berlin08 social+tools interview)
Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL): Synthetic Fuel Concept to Steal CO2 From Air “a new process...
Monkey Brand: Avoid Worthless Imitations
Reston: I was shopping for Indian condiments yesterday, and I saw this, which I of course had to buy:
Monkey Brand, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.
Ah! The entire mouth cavity!
Monkey Brand, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.
Monkey Brand, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.
Monkey Brand, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.
Aside from the charcoal, I don’t even know what this...
Primula Stovetop Espresso Maker
Reston: I am getting rid of the big countertop espresso maching I have in Reston, and going to this, which I was using at various places in Europe:
Primula Aluminum Stovetop Espresso Maker - 3 Cup, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.
Only problem is that it won’t be delivered until 4 March, and I will have already left on my next trip.
Backpack For Music
by Stowe Boyd, Reston
One of the things I am doing with Backpack is publishing my songs. I have been doing that in a messed up fashion on Ambivalence, but I think Backpack — because of the Textile support in posts — will be better:
.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; }.flickr-yourcomment { }.flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; }.flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em;...
Reconfiguring For Mobility
Reston: The recent experience at the World Mobile Congress — where I had a brand spanking new Nokia 810 and my Mac and I couldn’t connect to the Web through the overloaded Wifi there — has led me to start getting more serious about mobile connectivity via my cell phone. My EVDO card from Verizon doesn’t work in Europe, and has to be slid into the Mac or some other...
Backpack Newsroom
by Stowe Boyd, Reston
I have recently started to use Backpack again, motivated by an inchoate desire to get organized, and the apparent death-by-OS-upgrade of the Sidenote app I have been using for years to keep track of all sorts of junk. It just doesn’t work reliably with Leopard, so I had to let it go.
I use Packrat on the desktop to sync with Backpack, which has to be done...
links for 2008-02-23
More Americans Are Giving Up Golf - New York Times ” Over the past decade, the leisure activity most closely associated with corporate success in America has been in a kind of recession. The total number of people who play has declined or remained flat each year since 2000, dropping to about 26 million fr (tags: golf)
Conferring
New York: Somewhere along the way, everyone’s vision of what is supposed to be happening at conferences changes. In the past few years, I have enjoyed the ‘conferring with’ conferences the most, like Reboot and Lift. But even getting together with your pals can get, well, unrewarding.
Because of conflicts with actually building stuff — the theme for 2008, perhaps...
links for 2008-02-21
Florida: Evolution to Be Taught as a Theory - New York Times “State education officials voted to add evolution to the required course work in public schools, but only after a last-minute change depicting Darwin’s seminal work as merely a theory.” Like the theory of gravity. (tags: evolution stupidity)
Microsoft Said to Plan Proxy Fight for Yahoo - New York Times I still...
links for 2008-02-20
Internet tsar to make children’s surfing safer - National News, Frontpage - Independent.ie Oh, thank god! The internet is such a dangerous place, after all. (tags: ireland internet+is+dangerous)
links for 2008-02-19
Silicon Valley Losing Middle-Wage Jobs - New York Times “The vanishing jobs — defined as those paying $30,000 to $80,000 — represent workers who had been in the lower part of the white-collar pyramid, including secretaries, clerks and customer support representatives.” Outsourcing and downsizing. (tags: shrinking+middle+class silicon+valley)
For Publisher in Los Angeles, Cuts...
123people
Lausanne: Got an email about a new identity aggregations tool called 123people.com.
stowe boyd - everything you need to know. 123people.com, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.
I don’t really get this service: basically pulling together a folio of information on a given individual. Ok. But is it more than a better-formatted Google search? The tag cloud seems promising, but many of the...
A Tweetup and Social Media Meetup
Lausanne: Looks like I am being interrogated in DC on Feb 28th:
[from Happenings, advice & other technology thoughts !: New Venue for MD/DC/VA Tweetup - Feb 28th]
DATE: Thur, 2/28th
TIME: 7:00-8:00pm* *a one hour Meetup on….: Stowe Boyd (The Stowe Boyd- @stoweboyd, www.stoweboyd.com/message/) will chat with us. Andy Carvin will share avcool new NPR video project . PodcampDC...
A Tolstoy Moment
Lausanne: Tolstoy wrote, in Anna Karenina, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
The same is true of product companies, in a way. When things are ‘happy’, the natural lines of force seem to harmonize, and the effort of the participants seem to converge in good ways. When things are ‘unhappy’, there are all sorts of...
Mixin' It Up In Lausanne With Mixin
Lausanne: Scoble said that Mixin was the coolest thing at LIFT this year:
[from The coolest thing at LIFT: MixIn]
Every year I find something cool at LIFT. Two years ago I was the first site to talk about CoComment, which now has a million users.
This time I got a demo and met the development team for MixIn, which is a social calendar that hooks to Twitter. On Qik I got a good demo.
Robert...
Once More On Geoloco
Lausanne: I guess I will fall back on using the reporter’s dateline approach for geoloco information in my posts, since Dopplr doesn’t have the widget I want.
Yes, It Makes Me Proud To Be An American
Reading the International Herald Tribune in Lausanne this morning. Yet another book coming out that proves that Americans are know-nothing buffoons, as if I didn’t already know. Only 37% of Americans believe in evolution, for crying out loud.
[from Susan Jacoby: Bemoaning an America that values stupidity - International Herald Tribune By Patricia Cohen]
[…]
Selected from a...
Umair Haque's New Gig
Glad to see that Umair has landed in a position where he can has more — and deserved — impact. His new blog at the Harvard Business Online is called Edge Economy. Catchy. Hey… that’s what I call this economy, too!.
Just a sample:
[The Shrinking Advantage of Brands - Harvard Business Online’s Umair Haque]
What’s really going on here? It’s an example of what we...
A Dopplr Widget I Want
All the fooling around with mobile posting has gotten me thinking. I would like to have a widget generated on each trip I make by Dopplr, so I can grab it and paste it into my blog posts (or even better, have it automatically inserted into every post) showing where I was geographically when I posted.
It might look like this —
— and the href would point back to the Dopplr page...
Another Picture Of Mine In Schmap
San Francisco - Restaurants - Financial District, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.
I snapped this when Darcy asked me to lunch at the Salt House, a place opened by the Town Hall folks. I think I had a ribeye. Yum. Haven’t been back yet.
I Support Obama
In the interests of avoiding a protracted mess, I am throwing my support to Barack Obama.
.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; }.flickr-yourcomment { }.flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; }.flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; }[geotag: Lugano, Switzerland]
2 tags
Dopplr Cluster Cities
The Dopplr guys have listened to the users, again:
[from More Dopplr Raumzeitgeist detail: Cluster Cities]
[…]
What we are showing are what we call ‘Cluster Cities’ which is the basis of some new functionality you might have already noticed if you’re a Dopplr user that’s been studying their journal feeds/emails closely.
Rewind to Reboot, Copenhagen at the end of May 2007.
We’re...
Microsoft Sponsorship
I am finally getting around to describing the Mobile Post sponsorship going on here. The logo above represents this program, that I will be involved in over the next few months, I guess. And the one below shows where I am mobile posting from, although in this case, I am actually stationary.
Map It: lugano, switzerland
6220, N96, and 6210
So, I presumed that the obvious next phone for me to upgrade to was the n96, since I have found the n95 such a great experience. Well, it looks like the 6220 is going to be a better fit for me. Why?
6220 classic, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.
Turns out that the 6220 is optimized for photography. The 5M Carl Zeiss lens is much like that in my n95, but it has a xenon flash, which...
Nokia Share
I spoke with Serena Glover of Nokia’s Share team yesterday at the World Mobile Congress, and I was struck by the future vision that she outlined for that social media tool. Today the experience is somewhat divided — with some acions necessarily taking place off the phone on the Nokia Share website — but it seems that in the future more will be taking place on the...
links for 2008-02-12
E-Mail Is So Five Minutes Ago Mentions JP Rangaswami’s hatred of email (tags: jp+rangaswami email+delenda+est email)
First Evening In Barcelona
Arrived in Barcelona (at long last), after missing my connection in Paris. Will be staying *way* out of town in Vilanova i la Geltrú, and will be experimenting with a new Microsoft toolset for mobile blogging.
Map It: barcelona, spain
New Delhi To Barcelona: From Workstreamr To World...
I am sitting in Charles De Gaulle in Paris, after missing a connecting flight from New Delhi to Barcelona, headed to the World Mobile Congress (courtesy of Nokia) to fool with cool gear for a few days and hear what’s brewing in the mobile world. I will also be experimenting with some new mobile blogging tools from Microsoft, although I haven’t figured them out yet: that’s...
Groping in Japanese Trains
[from Cell phone message warns train gropers]
According to Tokyo Metropolitan Police, 1,853 people were arrested for groping passengers on trains in Tokyo in 2005. Experts say the incidence of harassment on trains is much higher, but women are often too embarrassed to report it.
