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
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
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!
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
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
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
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?
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
