Preoccupations

le Parkour

One part flaneur, one part breakdancer, skateboarding without the board, kung fu with the city as sparring partner. Parkour is the art of the traceur and it looks and sounds quite beautiful. As an art it was born in France and exists mainly in Europe. But as a practice it must be close to universal, and one wonders how it's never been an art before.

abstractdynamics, via blackbeltjones

First robots with muscles

A SILICON microrobot just half the width of a human hair has begun to crawl around in a Los Angeles lab, using legs powered by the pulsing of living heart muscle. It is the first time muscle tissue has been used to propel a micromachine. This distinctly futuristic development could lead to muscle-based nerve stimulators that would allow paralysed people to breathe without the help of a ventilator. And NASA — which is funding the research — hopes swarms of crawling "musclebots" could one day help maintain spacecraft by plugging holes made by micrometeorites. Whatever the ultimate applications of the technology, no one was more surprised to see the tiny musclebots finally move than Carlos Montemagno, the microengineer whose team is developing them at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has spent three disappointing years trying, and failing, to harness living muscle tissue to propel a micromachine. But when he and his team looked into their microscopes, they were amazed to see the latest version of their musclebot crawling around.

EurekAlert!, from New Scientist

Wikis

Ross Mayfield, CEO of Socialtext, has warm praise for Stowe Boyd's article in Darwin on wikis:

Wikis are built upon an inherently open model of social interaction and collaboration, with very little constraint placed on the participants. In a sense, this puts the onus back on the members of a project group to self-police: to build structure out of the minimalist forms of Wiki components, to correct others' grammar, syntax and wrong-headed arguments, to cajole others to your viewpoint or ideas where the project should be headed. But it's exactly this frisson between partners, affiliated around shared purpose, that builds social ties and generates social capital. Wikis directly support us in our efforts to get more from the whole than the sum of the parts.

Of Socialtext, Stowe Boyd says, 'their exemplary technology includes blogs right in the framework of the basic Wiki tools. This combination of complementary social tools is much more powerful than using the two technologies in parallel but unintegrated'.

Yale's Photonegatives Collection

The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Photonegatives Collection Database, is a remarkable resource. There is no index, but enter a keyword and search the collection for photographs of America's 'people and places at the turn of the previous century'. (Link via Boing Boing.)

Employers and employees' blogs: control freakery

When I set out to write a column about staff journalists who write Web logs in their spare time, I found that there are two principal types of employed journalist bloggers:

1. Those who are very careful about what they blog, never getting too controversial and seldom expressing opinions. Their employers know what they're doing and support them as long as they don't do anything that might put the news organization in a bad light.

2. Those who feel stymied by their media-company employers from writing what they want -- who look at the larger blog world and feel annoyed at their managers because they're not allowed such freedom of expression.

The former group was more than willing to talk to me, on the record. But the latter group would only talk off the record -- for fear of reprisals. Some keep their blogging secret from their managers, or at least try to. They resent being told to live to a standard of near-absolute objectivity even when they're not on company hours.

Steve Outing writing in Editor and Publisher (link via anil dash's daily links, 26.2.04)

FeedBurner

What is it? FeedBurner enhances your current RSS or Atom feeds in a variety of ways that YOU control, while simultaneously providing personalized usage and trend statistics that describe how your feed is being used.

Link via anil dash's daily links (26.2.04)

Blogging and News

BuzzMachine links to the Wall Street Journal with this excerpt from Lee Gomes' article:

These blogs are becoming an alternative-news universe, giving everyone with a PC and a Web connection access to the sorts of gossip that was once available only to reporters on the press bus. At a site like Feedster, which is to blogs what Google is to Web sites, you can track the rumor du jour. And what Napster did for MP3s, blogs are doing for news -- or, at least for rumors. They are eliminating the gatekeepers and all barriers to entry.... I am, in my private life, a voracious reader of these things, as are most of my friends, reporters included.

Researching search engines

Thought-provoking article by Wade Roush in Technology Review, 'Search Beyond Google'. Google, of course, works on Page Rank (unlike Teoma, 'which ranks results according to their standing among recognized authorities on a topic, and Australian startup Mooter, which studies the behavior of users to better intuit exactly what they’re looking for'). Despite its advantages, PageRank has a few flaws:

Just as earlier search engines could be fooled by pages peppered with thousands of keywords in “invisible” white-on-white type, an unscrupulous site owner who wants his Web address to appear higher in Google’s search results can easily publish thousands or even millions of junk pages that contain links to his site, artificially raising its rank. (Google says it has ways of counteracting such attacks, but won’t discuss them.) The same loophole in PageRank allows “Google bombing”— a recent phenomenon in which bloggers make a humorous or political point by creating so many links to a given site that it comes up first when users type a specific term into the Google search box. More bothersome to some critics, however, is PageRank’s obsession with fame. A legitimate page that matches a Google user’s search terms perfectly may get buried in search results simply because there aren’t enough other pages pointing to it, notes Daniel Brandt, a Web developer who runs a critical site called Google Watch. A page’s relevance to an individual user, Brandt and other critics argue, may depend on more than its popularity. “Just because the rest of the planet thinks that this is the number one travel site doesn’t mean it is the number one travel site for you,” says Liesl Capper, founder and CEO of Sydney-based upstart Mooter, who believes she just might have a better way. ...

Whichever technology hooks tomorrow’s Web surfers, its builder will earn enormous influence — and handsome profits. Some 550 million search requests are entered every day worldwide (245 million of them in the United States). By 2007, the paid-placement advertising revenue generated by all these searches will reach about $7 billion, says Piper Jaffray analyst Safa Rashtchy. Yet surveys indicate that almost a quarter of users don’t find what they’re looking for in the first set of links returned by a search engine. That’s partly because the precious needles of information we seek are buried under a haystack that grows by some 60 terabytes every day. And it’s why brutal competition in the search industry is certain to continue, especially as search companies usher in a host of advanced technologies, such as natural-language processing and machine learning.

Link via Memex 1.1

Music and digital rights — continued

Eminem is suing Apple (' 'Lose Yourself' was rapped out by a ten-year-old in an iTunes Music Store commercial shown on MTV last summer. 'Lose Yourself' was the theme song to the movie Eight Mile, which starred Eminem and is based on his life story. The critics called it a "hummer". Now after Eight Mile, you have to file, then it comes to trial, there's no denial.'), The Register reports, and today is Grey Tuesday.

What's that? 'Downhill Battle went ahead with its Grey Tuesday protest against EMI, providing links to hundreds of sites making DJ Danger Mouse's Grey Album available for download' (The Register).

The album mixes Jay-Z's Black Album with the Beatles' White Album much to EMI's displeasure. EMI distributes Beatles' music and has sent cease and desist orders to DJ Danger Mouse, stores and now the Web sites looking to distribute the music. Ignoring these requests, anti-RIAA activists at Downhill Battle collected a long list of Web sites willing to put the music up for free.

"Despite your letter, Downhill Battle will be posting the Grey Album on our website tomorrow," the Web site wrote in a message to EMI. "Your efforts to suppress this music stifle creativity and harm the public interest; we will not be intimidated into backing down. Downhill Battle has a fair-use right to post this music under current copyright law and the public has a fair-use right to hear it. Opposing EMI’s censorship campaign is precisely the purpose of Tuesday’s protest and we won’t waver from that goal."

A few of Downhill Battle's co-conspirators did seem to back down with EMI circling. One Web site simply posted a track list for the Grey Album instead of actually putting songs up. But for the most part, it looks like a far reaching download system is on the go.

Weblogs of the future

Following Dave Winer's posting ...

This is a question for non-technical bloggers. (That is people who use blogging tools, not those who develop them.) Premise: We've reached a plateau in blogging tools. There haven't been a lot of changes in the last two or three of years. The growth continues, lots more weblogs, and we've got better tools for reading (aggregators). Question: What's next in writing tools for weblogs? If you could influence people who are making the tools, what feature or features would you want? Think as big as you like, or as detailed as you like. What bug is most in your way. Ramble, please. Is there one thing you'd kill for? Or perhaps you're satisfied with the tools as they are. I hope your comments are on the record so I can assemble a quote sheet as the beginning of a conversation that I hope will yield better tools for all of us.

... Scobleizer has a great résumé of the current position, pros and cons: TypePad ('business model', 'great looking templates that are standards-based'), Radio UserLand (smart client: 'If UserLand's servers were hit by terrorists, for instance, I would be able to get all my data back up and running within hours on a different server. I bet your weblog tool can't do that.'), Das Blog (the most useful referer information I've ever seen in a weblog tool.) ... .Text gets a special mention as 'the best way to create group weblogs'. This last is one that all in education seeking to create collaborative blogs for teaching purposes should look at.

Scoble finishes off with his wish-list:

Some other things I want, but haven't found?

1) An Outlook plugin. I read 1296 feeds. When I find something cool I want to drag it to a folder and have it AUTOMAGICALLY put it up on a weblog. I don't even want to click post. So, I want to have a "really public folder." ...

2) I want an XHTML WYSIWYG editor that writes nice and consistent code. You might not know this, but I hand code all the HTML on my blog (I'm typing into the HTML editor in Radio UserLand). Why do I do that? Because it's the only way that I can ensure that my page complies with the validator and gives consistent HTML markup so that my CSS style sheets (ugly as they are) can work properly.

3) Add in some service integration. Technorati and Feedster are two that I'd love to see integrated in some way into my tools/services.

Anyway, I'm still waiting for a blogging tool that wraps it all up.

BuzzMachine has a long and excellent wish-list: simplicity, mobility, distributed posting ... (Anil Dash comments, anil dash's daily links, 25.2.2004: 'a lot of Jeff's ideas are on my personal wishlist, too'.)