Oblomovka

2003-04-30»

• streamerp2p - P2P streaming (British)
• alluvium - P2P streaming (US, needs only Webserver)
• Fat Kreme - disgusting food hybrid from Accordion Guy's so-called friends
• CSLI Calendar - comprehensive calendar of Silicon Valley talks (has mailing list)
• Air Traffic Control - day-in-the-QuickTime-movie-life (from Robot Wisdom)
• GeoSnapper - Photographs pegged to GPS coords
• Deee-lite singer sues Sega - Lady Miss Keir claims Space Channel 5 heroine is just her with less polygons

The Internet Archive building now has a warchalking flag outside it.

2003-04-29»

Whenever Apple releases something, there's always a rush of people pointing out other companies that have done the same thing, only better in some way. Like it was written in Lisp, or uses righteous Ogg encoding, or just isn't Apple. Usually you just let the waves of counterexamples crash around you until they hit their correct target, which is the Apploids thrashing in orgasm around your feet, but my... Neurosaudio has some seriously out-there features. Song recognition, built-in FM transmitter, MP3 recording. I'm not sure, but it might even be more expensive than Apple. Talking about beating someone on their home turf.

2003-04-28»

• Lumeta, net mapping thing started by Bill Cheswick who is talking at the Gates Science Building this Wednesday about the future of Internet Security.

• "We don't pay you to be as confused as he is" - Spinal Tap's (and The Simpsons and A Might Wind's) Harry Shearer writes a ingenious piece in the NYTimes suggesting that if the music industry doesn't want kids with more time than money to pirate their music, maybe they should stop exclusively marketing to them.
• Rand report on the troubled spread of the Net to China, Russia, Latin America, Middle East. Key assertions: China's crackdown is working for now, Russia too weak to really kickstart IT, Latin America e-commerce suffering from lack of credit/debit cards, popular distrust of delivery procedures. Mexico most promising model. Elsewhere, establishment of Internet centers with a "human face" could "facilitate Internet use in small towns and villages". I have no idea what they mean by that, or whether they just missed out on what a tourist revenue-spinner cybercafes are, but some nice barcharts and stats.
• Domestic use of SMS and IM, another talk, this time at PARC on Thursday. Teenage use of IM and SMS is another fork between Europe and the US, although I guess it's more to do with the ratio of usage of the two forms. I should start automatically exporting data from my calendar for talks like these. They're often fascinating. The PARC talks have a video archive but it seems to be lagging behind.
• Project - Aura. Designing interfaces and hardware for an environment where attention is the scarce resource. Bluesky wearable, pervasive, task-driven computing research.
• The science of pricing (via Dan Moniz). This touches on what this week's column will be about. That is to say, the column will be ripped wholesale from Dan and my conversation about this topic.

2003-04-27»

I've been online, thinking and talking all week, in one way or another, but I don't seem to have kept a record of any of it. I don't have any notes, didn't take any photographs, didn't update any wikis, and didn't even send out much email (I did, however, spend too much time in IRC, which is never a good sign of anything). What makes that worse is that much of my time was spent discussing how to tech-transfer knowledge out of real world conferences like Emerging Tech to a wider audience online.

To be honest, Emerging Tech suffers from this the least: much of the thinking that occurred here has already spilt out into the wider world via various blogs. Lisa Rein videod a lot of the talks, and will be uploading them to the Internet Archive . And compared to say, Asilomar, which was on this week, and is one of those super-secret invitational conferences where everything is off the record and they kill anyone who even menti-urgh urgh thunk, ETCON is a veritable fountain of openness. And I think benefits no end from that.

Anyway, we swapped out live blogging to make room for baby-tending and party-organising. Fortunately, others were there.