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
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
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!
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
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
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
A non-profit organization chartered to promote arts and culture within its community will be curating a new elmcity hub. The curator plans to invite dozens of member organizations to contribute to the hub — that is, to manage their public schedules using calendar applications, and to convey the URLs of their calendar feeds to the … Continue reading Using sparkcasts to enhance step-by-step instructions
Every Christmas we watch It’s a Wonderful Life. This year I’ll be imagining Jimmy Stewart saying, to a panicked crowd of delicious.com users rushing for the exits, “Now, hold on, it’ll work out, we’ve just got to stick together.” If you’ve never used the social bookmarking service that began life with the whimsical domain name … Continue reading How George Bailey can save Delicious
I’m just wrapped up a screencast about the elmcity project. It’ll stand in for me at an upcoming event I can’t attend, and serve as an explanation I can point others too. This is the first screencast I’ve worked on in ages, and also the first in which I appear as a picture-in-picture talking head. … Continue reading To PIP (picture-in-picture video) or not to PIP?
My guest for this week’s Innovators show is Sal Khan. He’s the creator of http://khanacademy.org, a catalog of more than 1000 YouTube video lessons in math, physics, biology, chemistry, and economics. All of these videos are made by Sal himself, in an engagingly personal style, using simple screencasting tools. When I first got interested in … Continue reading Talking with Sal Khan about YouTube tutoring as guerilla public service
I’ve had many conversations with Stefano Mazzocchi and David Huynh [1, 2, 3] about the data magic they performed at MIT’s Project Simile and now perform at Metaweb. If you’re somebody who values clean data and has wrestled with the dirty stuff, these screencasts about a forthcoming product called Freebase Gridworks will make you weep … Continue reading Freebase Gridworks: A power tool for data scrubbers
The endnotes for the book I’m now reading are a mixture of conventional citations and URLs. The former, expressed as publisher, book or journal title, author, date, and page number, seem not nearly so useful as the latter. Would you rather visit the library or click a link? But nowadays cited URLs also come with … Continue reading Talking with Herbert Van de Sompel about a web that remembers
As Phil Windley mentioned the other day, I’ll be speaking at the Kynetx Impact conference, April 27-28 in Salt Lake City. Last year I interviewed Phil about what Kynetx does. It’s hard to boil it down to an elevator pitch without examples, so here’s one that came up today: Scott Hanselman’s Put Missing Kids on … Continue reading Upcoming talk at Kynetx Impact
I’ve posted the Python script I used to make the Pivot visualization of this blog. I need to set it aside for now and do other things, but here’s a snapshot of the process for my future self and for anyone else who’s interested. Using deepzoom.py to create Deep Zoom images and collections I’m using … Continue reading How to create a Pivot visualization of a WordPress blog
In his writeup on Google Wave, Dare Obasanjo says: I’m sure there are thousands of Web developers out there right now asking themselves “would my app be better if users could see each others’ edits in real time?”,”should we add a playback feature to our service as well” [ed note – wikipedia could really use … Continue reading Replaying history
My guest for this week’s Innovators show is Peter O’Toole from mTuitive, a company whose authoring toolkit for clinical data collection I featured in a 2006 screencast. mTuitive is working at the intersection of a number of disciplines that all need to come together to deliver cheaper and better health care. First, usability. Designing clinical … Continue reading Talking with Peter O’Toole about gathering clinical data and sharing medical knowledge
At its core, your browser is powered by an engine called the Document Object Model, hereafter DOM. You can think of the DOM as an outline, and the browser as an outline processor that shows and hides things, displays things in different ways, and even adds, removes, or rearranges things. Nowadays what you see, when … Continue reading Magic glasses and magic projectors: Private versus public augmentation of experience
This week’s Innovators show has the lowdown on Phil Windley‘s new company, Kynetx. The first application of the Kynetx technology is Azigo’s RemindMe service. It alters search-results pages to highlight cases where the user has — but would likely have forgotten about — a discount-qualifying membership. There are a number of moving parts in this … Continue reading A conversation with Phil Windley about contextualized browsing
Back in 2005 I made a screencast that showed how the convergence of GPS and online mapping enables us to collectively annotate the planet. The Tracks4Africa folks have been doing that since 2000. On this week’s Innovators show, Johann Groenewald explains how some GPS enthusiasts who are passionate about exploring, documenting, and preserving Africa’s rural … Continue reading Tracks4Africa: Mapping and annotating Africa’s remote eco-destinations
I should get a life, I know, but I can’t help myself, one of my favorite pastimes is figuring out new ways to wrangle information. One of the reasons that IronPython had me at hello is that, my fondness for the Python programming language notwithstanding, IronPython sits in an interesting place: on Windows, side by … Continue reading Two IronPythonic spreadsheets
On this week’s ITConversations show I asked Martin Murray, who is chief spokesperson for Public Service of New Hampshire — and @psnh on Twitter — to tell the story behind this atypical pattern of Twitter followers: The quantum jump occurs on December 13, and corresponds to the epic ice storm on December 11/12. The storm … Continue reading A conversation with @psnh about the ice storm, social media, and customer service
