Strategies for Internet citizens
The column republished below, originally at http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2005/04/22/primetime.html, was the vector that connected me to my dear friend Gardner Campbell. I’m resurrecting it here partly just to bring it back online, but mainly to celebrate the ways in which Gardner — a film scholar among many other things — is, right now, bringing his film expertise … Continue reading The New Freshman Comp
I’ve been discussing Mastodon UX wishlists with some new acquaintances there. This excerpt from A Bloomberg terminal for Mastodon concludes with part of my own wishlist. In a Mastodon timeline, a chatty person can dominate what you see at a glance. When we participate in social media we are always making bids for one another’s … Continue reading Create your own Mastodon UX
In The Chess Master and the Computer, Garry Kasparov famously wrote: The winner was revealed to be not a grandmaster with a state-of-the-art PC but a pair of amateur American chess players using three computers at the same time. Their skill at manipulating and “coaching” their computers to look very deeply into positions effectively counteracted … Continue reading Working With Intelligent Machines
Asking questions in conversation has become problematic. For example, try saying this out loud: “I wonder when Martin Luther King was born?” If you ask that online, a likely response is: “Just Google it!” Maybe with a snarky link: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=when was martin luther king born? Asking in conversation is frowned upon too. Why ask us … Continue reading Don’t just Google it! First, let’s talk!
Wherever social tagging is supported as an optional feature, its use obeys a power law. Some people use tags consistently, some sporadically, most never. This chart of Hypothesis usage illustrates the familiar long-tail distribution: Those of us in the small minority of consistent taggers care a lot about the tag namespaces we’re creating. We tag … Continue reading Renaming Hypothesis tags
A few years back I watched Joe Gregorio’s 2015 OSCON talk and was deeply impressed by the core message: “Stop using JS frameworks, start writing reusable, orthogonally-composable units of HTML+CSS+JS.” Earlier this year I asked Joe to reflect on what he’s since learned about applying the newish suite of web standards known collectively as web … Continue reading Web components used in the ClinGen app
Web technology, at its best, has always occupied a sweet spot at the intersection of two complementary modes: interactive and programmatic. You interact with a web page by plugging its URL into a browser. Then you read what’s there or, if the page is an app, you use the app. Give that same URL, web … Continue reading Controlling a browser extension with puppeteer
Journalists are increasingly being asked to show their work. Politifact does that with a sources box, like this: This is great! The more citation of sources, the better. If I want to check those sources, though, I often wind up spending a lot of time searching within source articles to find passages cited implicitly but … Continue reading Annotations are an easy way to Show Your Work
The most basic operation in Hypothes.is — select text on a page, click the Annotate button — is not yet accessible to a visually-impaired person who is using a screenreader. I’ve done a bit of research and come up with an approach that looks like it could work, but also raises many questions. In the … Continue reading Towards accessible annotation: a prototype and some questions
Update: See this post (with screencasts!) Mike Caulfield’s Digital Polarization Initiative (DigiPo) is a template for a course that will lead students through exercises to analyze and fact-check news stories. The pedagogical approach Mike describes here is evolving; in parallel I’ve been evolving a toolkit to help students research and organize the raw materials of … Continue reading A toolkit for fact checkers
I’m not a scholar, nor do I play one on TV, but when I search Google Scholar I find that I’m cited there a few times, most notably for a 1994 BYTE cover story, Componentware. The details there are at best of historical interest but the topic remains evergreen: How do we package software in … Continue reading Componentware Revisited
My short 2009 review1 of Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Discipline includes this Kevin Kelly quote that continues to resonate for me: Kevin Kelly calls the book “a short course on how to change your mind intelligently” — in this case, about cities, nuclear power, and genetic and planetary engineering. These are all things that Steward … Continue reading Liminal thinking at scale
I just wrote my first blog post for Hypothesis, the web annotation startup I joined recently. In the post I talk about how a specific feature of the annotator — its ability to sync annotations across local and/or web-based copies of the same file — illustrates a general approach to working with copies of resources … Continue reading Adventures in annotation
Thanks to my friend Mike Caulfield, an educational technologist who’s been digging into Ward Cunningham’s Smallest Federated Wiki, I’ve now got a much clearer idea of how SFW and Thali could play together and why they should. Mike’s recent series on SFW is the best review and analysis of Ward’s newest creation that I’ve seen: … Continue reading How Thali could make the Smallest Federated Wiki even smaller
John McPhee has lately been reflecting, in a series of New Yorker articles, on his long career as one of the world’s leading writers of nonfiction. In this week’s issue we learn that one of my favorite of his books, The Pine Barrens, was born on a picnic table. It was there that he lay … Continue reading How John McPhee structures stories from his notes
As Elm City hubs grow, with respect to both raw numbers of events and numbers of categories, unfiltered lists of categories become unwieldy. So I’m noodling on ways to focus initially on a filtered list of “important” categories. The scare quotes indicate that I’m not yet sure how to empower curators to say what’s important. … Continue reading Flash Fill: Text wrangling for non-programmers
Mike Champion raises an interesting point that applies to Microsoft but also more broadly: The culture at MS is very F2F-oriented…if you’re out of sight, you have to work hard not to be out of mind. But then he adds: Geographic distance will help keep you from getting sucked into the groupthink of whatever group … Continue reading Being here, being there
Sean McCown is a professional database administrator who writes the Database Underground blog for InfoWorld. Lately his postings have been full of references to videos. One day, he watched a Sysinternals training flick, combining live video with screencasting, and made immediate use of it to pinpoint and fix a problem. Another day, he made his … Continue reading Video knowledge
Recently I’ve been noodling with Django, a Python-based web application framework that’s comparable in many ways to Ruby on Rails. It appeals to me for a variety of reasons. Python has been my language of choice for several years, and going forward I expect it to help me build bridges between the worlds of LAMP … Continue reading Django gymnastics
In honor of my first get-together with the MSDN Channel 9 and 10 folks later today, I thought I’d do a spot of media hacking in support of the cause. One of the things that caught my eye recently was Brian Jones’ screencast on data/view separation in Word 2007. It’s published as a SWF (Shockwave … Continue reading Channel 9 media hacking
In response to my item on media hacking the other day, this comment alerted me to a really sweet bookmarklet that adds a slider to a Flash movie. You don’t get timecodes but you do get start/pause/scrub which is a tremendous benefit. When I tried it out, on both Firefox and IE, I was reminded … Continue reading Rewriting the web with MSIE
Last week’s Friday podcast ran afoul of travel craziness but the series continues this week with a further exploration of Dabble DB, the through-the-web database that was also featured in a screencast. In my conversation with Avi Bryant and Andrew Catton we explore some of the underpinnings of Dabble, including the remarkable fact that it’s … Continue reading A conversation with Avi Bryant and Andrew Catton about Dabble DB
Today’s 4-minute screencast, which explores Vista’s common feed system, serves multiple purposes. First, I wanted to familiarize myself with this stuff, and do so in a way that would elicit responses that help me understand how other folks are reacting to it. I am intensely interested in the reasons why people do or don’t take … Continue reading A screencast about common feeds in Vista
As I mentioned the other day, it’d be useful to have audio-only versions of many of the Channel 9 videos for folks who (like me) have more time to listen away from the computer than to watch at the computer. Pretty soon that’ll start happening for new stuff. Then, of course, there’s the archive. One … Continue reading Divergent citation-indexing paths
The goal of the search strategy I outlined the other day was to find Mary Czerwinski, a Microsoft researcher, and interview her for a podcast. I did find her, and the resulting podcast is here. We had a great time talking about ways that adaptive user interfaces can leverage spatial and temporal memory, about ambient … Continue reading Adaptive user interfaces for focused attention
The other day I wrote: …as someone who is composing this blog entry as XHTML, in emacs, using a semantic CSS tag that will enable me to search for quotes by Mike Linksvayer and find the above fragment, I’m obviously all about metadata coexisting with human-readable HTML. Operating in that mode for years has given … Continue reading Blogging from Word 2007, crossing the chasm
In this 14-minute screencast I interview Scott Dart, who blogs here, about how tagging works in Vista’s Photo Gallery. I wanted to look over Scott’s shoulder, rather than do this myself with my own photos, because Scott’s been managing a lot of photos in this app for a long time, and he’s in a position … Continue reading Tagging and foldering in Photo Gallery
Yesterday’s screencast turned out to be a nice example of how the screencasting medium can communicate what otherwise cannot be explained easily, if at all. Here’s the kind of reaction you hope a screencast will elicit: I checked out the Photo Gallery earlier, but didn’t see the added value. Now I do. It’s hard to … Continue reading Screencasting tips
Today while editing a podcast I stopped to record a bit of the on-screen action. I’ve written before about the audio editing techniques used by the NPR pros make conversations sound clear and intelligible. I use the same methods on my podcasts, and I’ve been meaning to show it. Today’s two-and-a-half-minute screencast gives you a … Continue reading The digital darkroom revealed
For several of my screencasts I used an unusual method which I mentioned here. I made my camcorder be the computer’s display, and dubbed the output to tape1. My reasons were twofold. First, I wanted to capture a lot of raw footage without having to wait for the captured data to get written to a … Continue reading Direct-to-camcorder screen recording
