Something went horribly right...

Daniel Lanovaz has sent a message to the squeak-dev mailing list. I've reproduced it verbatim below the fold. Fun stuff. [Read More!]

This funny video features a scribe who is used to dealing with scrolls. He contacts the help desk to deal with the new “book” technology.

My colleagues at the office see it as a send-up of users. I'm thinking it's making fun of programmers...

Last week, Qwaq announced Forums, its enterprise conferencing product.

Yesterday, the Croquet Consortium announced its own formation, and the availability of the open SDK 1.0.

And yesterday, Impara announced an English language and free trial version of Plopp, its kid's sketching product.

The blogosphere is busy: croquet, Qwaq, Plopp.

There has been private, academic, commercial and non-profit Croquet development for a while now. Much has been internal and proprietary (and even military) and so the general public has not had a chance to see it. Less than two months ago, we cobbled up an open sample application.

Meanwhile, the folks at Qwaq have been working hard in stealth mode, building a sophisticated application and aiming to be the first clearly commercial Croquet play. Read more.

How do you coordinate activity across a network? People are doing this all the time, with varying degrees of success. But how is it supposed to work? What is the model to be followed? When I graduated mid-eighties, “Distributed Systems” was still a graduate specialty subject, not a pervasive guiding principle. Today, people like myself don't seem to have a common ontology of approaches. Well, it's about time. [Read More!]

I've admitted that I didn't immediately get the point of the One Laptop Per Child project, but now I'm now very excited about the ideas behind this non-profit effort to build a $100 mesh-network computer to be owned by children in the developing world. This essay captures a lot of what I feel and wonder about it, including some fears of dystopian unexpected consequences. [Read More!]

An interesting thing happens when a medium has enough bandwidth to be “rich medium.” It crosses a threshold from merely being an informational medium to being an evocative medium.

Consider radio, which was initially used to carry Morse code over the wireless tracts between ships at sea and shore. The entire communications payload of a message could be perfectly preserved in notating the discrete dots and dashes. Like digital media, the informational content was completely preserved regardless of whether it was carried by radio, telegraph, or paper. But when radio started carrying voice, there was communication payload that was not completely preserved in the context of other media. The human voice conveys more subtlety than mere words.

Thus far, the Internet has been mostly informational. We do use it to transmit individual sound and video presentational work, but the Internet platforms in these situations are merely the road on which these travel rather than the medium itself. (My kids say they are listening to a song or watching a video, rather than that they are using the Internet or that they are on-line. The medium is the music and video.)

So, what happens when an Internet platform supports voice and video, both live and prerecorded, and allows individual works to be combined and recombined and annotated and added to and for the whole process to be observed? Do “sites” become evocative? Do presentations on them become a performance art? Do we loose veracity or perspicuity as the focus shifts to how things are said rather than what is said? Here's a radio performance musing on some of this and more.

I think maybe this is the point where the medium becomes the message. If a technology doesn't matter because everything is preserved in other forms, then the technology isn't really a distinct medium in McLuhan's sense.

I'm sure getting a lot of junk mail lately. In the war between spammers and spam filters, the spammers are winning. I remember Paul Graham speaking five or six years ago at the AI lab about his ideas for Bayesian spam filters. I don't think there was a single person in the room who didn't think, “But why don't the spammers just send their message in an image?” Well, pretty much all mail clients and many institutional filter's have implemented Paul's ideas anyway. It worked for a good while, but now of course the bad guys are sending pictures. I feel that I'm missing something important in not understanding why it has taken them so long. [Read More!]

I wanted to tell you a wonderful short story I had heard.

Listen to this woman - clearly from within a couple hundred miles of that region between Cologne and Katmandu. She'll tell you a tale pulled from the darkest depths of her distant memory. You’ll learn something about how all of us perceive things.
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I've written before about my belief that we're inexorably entering — and some of us resisting — a paradigm shift in how humans think of information, imagination, creativity, freedom, and non-real property. So I was unexpectedly delighted to receive this letter to all of the university's Division of Information Technology staff, from our new (heh heh) interim CIO, Ken Frazier. (Below the fold.) [Read More!]