At http://search.everyzing.com/, I searched for “Jon Udell” and got all your IT conversations podcasts, fully transcribed and time coded, including the transcript of this show with Dance & Carter. Clicking around and choosing “Full Text”, as it starts to play notice that *every word* is a hyperlink to a time code.

This interview has more than the usual transcription errors, I guess because the guests are being very conversational. There are so many possible uses of this system, but one application is worth mentioning. I am studying Spanish, and Everyzing supports Spanish podcasts, too:

http://search.everyzing.com/index.jsp?il=es

Say I like computers, so I type in “computadora” and I can listen to lots of podcasts about IT. Since each word is a hyperlink, I can listen over and over to the pronunciation of the speaker, and the transcription is a great help, even with some errors, for understanding what is being said.

They make an interesting point: generally interactivity adds to a site’s cred, but not always. Certain types of interactivity seem to have no effect, and apparently too much of a good thing sours user experience. Not simple stuff!

With so much talk about the power of XMPP (Marshall Kirkpatrick’s “Could Instant Messaging (XMPP) Power the Future of Online Communication?” at RWW is a good example) I’m thinking along another line: what functions are really peripheral and which are core?
I love widgets, and I’m plum tickled to farm out such as the forum-like functions provided by six groups (http://groundplane.sixgroups.com/ becomes a toolbar at the top of http://groundplane.org … pretty slick!) and yet, and yet, I bet I’m not alone in drawing a line at comments; I think both coComment and DisQus are real slick, but I don’t want comments on my site extracted by an external service.

There’s something quantum happening there … “tightly coupled” and “loosely coupled” are certainly not binary, and yet there’s a continuum of some sort along which they stand as poles.
And I think the same applies with interactivity: there’s packaging — fun stuff that makes information entertaining — and then there’s … what?

I don’t think we’ve grappled with the heavy-lifting aspects of interactive information. Not yet.
We’ve been doing scientific visualization for quite a long time. It’s been a decade since I gave my talk to the psych department at the local U, and that was just on the power of VRML (Long live Cosmo Player!). Science has been putting it to work, heavy work, for many years. But in the public space?

Maybe we’re too distracted by the fun of it all, browsing and light grazing.
Or maybe we haven’t attended to the fact that knowledge is a social construct because we haven’t yet dared to demand that experts relinquish their monopoly on decision-making.

Strang loops indeed!

That was, as Douglas Hofstadter would say, a strange loop!

thanks for taking the time.
g