Links for 1-25-07

• Thomas Hawk's Digital Connection: Top 10 Hacks on Flickr More interesting flickr hacks
• since1968.com: Mark Hamburg Interview: Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Part 1 of 2 Mark's the founder and engineering manager of Adobe's Lightroom project, a new Apple Aperture competitor that I've been following through beta
• Vista to give HD Photo format more exposure | CNET News.com There's a new photo format in Vista. I understand the general cynicism from many quarters but this would actually seem to fill a need that isn't well met today. And the loosening of license terms is encouraging.
• Paid Content "For all the yelling, I don't know that there's a real problem - an arbitrary MS staffer is no more likely to be biased than an arbitrary Wikipedia author - and it's entirely possible to get wildly negative content from MS haters." I side with James here.
• Absolutely Del.icio.us Tools Collection Lots of tools for working with del.icio.us. (Although the basic APIs they have to work with are still fairly limiting.)
• The Online Photographer: Do Photography Websites Need to Grow Up? I'm less convinced that we're going to see a lot of per-pay sites. The value threshhold seems pretty high.
• Napster 3.0 - The Jason Calacanis Weblog I ran into The Hype Machine at Mashup Camp. I spend less time on music than many, but it aggregates blogs in a very useful way.

Private Tags in del.icio.us

It seems that del.icio.us has recently added a feature that allows you to save tags as private. It's not particularly obvious; to access it, you have to go into your settings and enable "private saving." This seems useful for a couple of scenarios:

• You expose your "tag cloud" through a widget on your blog or elsewhere and you simply don't want to pollute it with sites that may just pertain to some current, short-term task. (e.g. if you saved some pointers to an item that you're in the process of buying).
• You save some sites that pertain to personal content. Presumably, you have anything truly sensitive password-protected. But that doesn't necessarily mean you want to spread the link far-and-wide. Or you may just not want to publicize an interest in a particular type of information--whether health-related or otherwise.

Of course, you don't have to use del.icio.us to save sensitive links but it's such a handy tool that it's good to be able to do so. (With the caveat, which should go without saying, that any confidential information needs to be protected by more than obscurity (e.g. an unpublicized link) anyway.)

One of the commenters on this post suggests that an alternative to making posts public or private individually is to create separate users for public and private links. I haven't experimented enough to comment on which approach is generally easier. [UPDATE: My initial take is that having multiple user ids on del.icio.us is awkward to manage because of the way the site works. You have to do a lot of explicit logging on and off; the site leaves you logged on pretty much indefinitely from a given browser image and there seems to be no way to post a tag to a specific account other than the currently logged-in one.]

via Anne.

Visualizing

As an analyst, I keep on the lookout for better ways to visualize and organize information. I'll cop to being sort of an unstructured sort of guy; most of the things I try don't amount to much. For example, I latched onto taking notes using Freemind (a mind-mapping program) for a time. But I ended up back in a text editor. In a similar vein, I've tried to incorporate some "best practices" from Getting Things Done (such as doing things immediately if they can be done in five minutes). But I've never been much for structured systems as such.

That said, via Guy Kawasaki, here's a great "periodic table" of visualization methods that's well worth checking out. Guy also notes:

Ralph Lengler and Martin J. Eppler created it. You might also enjoy reading their paper, entitled “Towards a Periodic Table of Visualization Methods for Management”

Another Search Oddity (this time Google Groups)

Earlier this month, I ran across some apparently unusual search results using Microsoft Live Search. I still think they were peculiar but I wasn't able to pin anything down conclusively. See the posts here and here.

Now I have something odd from Google Groups (i.e. their Usenet archive) in the form of content that used to be there but now appears to be missing. I understand that Google sometimes removes content for copyright and other reasons, but I can't imagine that's the case here. It's just an old post from the comp.os.ms-windows.apps.utilities.win95 newsgroup discussing an old DOS-based program of mine, Directory Freedom.

I was going through some old paper files and I ran across a hardcopy of an old (1996) posting that heaped (rather overly effusive) praise on my program. The hardcopy was a printout of a Google Groups search result. I can't tell the exact date, but there's a 2001 Google copyright notice on the bottom so I'd assume it's from 2001 or not much later. (A scan of the hardcopy is here.) Anyway, just for kicks, I thought I'd pull up the link and save a copy of the page. And I couldn't find it by searching Google Groups.

I'm not sure what to make of this. I first tried searching using some unique terms from the post and didn't come up with anything. Then I reverted to using the same search string as I had originally ("gordon haff") and going through all the results by hand. Still nothing. As far as I can tell, the post is just gone (or at least removed from search results).

Have I missed something obvious? Or is there some other explanation for this result?

[UPDATE- Mystery (mostly) solved thanks to Brandon who tracked down a search string that did work. (See comments.) My name is mis-spelled in the post in question. So why did it show up in my previous search? I can't say for sure but perhaps Google was just returning "looser" search results five years ago when there were a lot fewer sites and posts than there are today.]

Links From Mashup Camp

As I've written about on Illuminata Perspectives, I'm spending most of this week at Mashup University and Mashup Camp at MIT. Here are a few things that particularly caught my eye that I'll be checking out further.

My first link isn't directly connected to "mashups" (see this piece by my colleague Jonathan Eunice for a broader discussion of the whole mashup phenomenon.) However, the principal investigator for the FutureBOSTON competition connected with this event, Tom Piper, has led a lot of interesting work previously. I highly recommend checking out Beyond the Big Dig, a series of case studies about urban open space projects that have many parallels--both good and ill--to the continued wrangling over open space that the Big Dig freed-up in Boston.

If you're into boating, checkout Virgil Zetterlind's destinsharks.com. It's a boating and fishing blog, but apropos the topic at hand, it's a mashup of NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) data, such as buoy locations and water depth, with Google Earth. It's still a work-in-progress, but what's already in place is really worth checking out.

I'll have to dig into some of the development tools that I've seen a bit deeper before I can have a real opinion on them, but the Boxely UI Toolkit from AOL for developing rich desktop applications is one interesting possibility. It allows for all sorts of interesting animations and transitions for multimedia content as well as for the basic interface elements. A preview is available for download.

A few other resources that may be worth checking out:

• programmableweb.com - General resource for mashups and Web2.0 APIs
• openkapow.com - Simplify mashups development (including RSS and screen-scrapes)
• microformats.org - The AOL guys were really pushing these as an alternative to heavier-weight XML

From the dot bomb Hall of Fame

This tongue in cheek Etrade Superbowl ad from 2000 is probably the ultimate capture (at least with the benefit of hindsight) of the dot com Superbowl TV ad craziness.

(Their commercial the following year, in the midst of the deflating bubble, captured the zeitgeist of that time pretty well too, but I don't see a copy online.)

(As a side note, Adcritic.com was a fun source of entertaining TV ads during the first Internet boom but they (wisely from a business perspective) morphed into a subscription site for the advertising industry. These days, YouTube provides a convenient, if not entirely legal, alternative.)

The Hard(ware) Side of Collaboration

Better collaboration among remote teams and groups is certainly going to require new software and better ways of thinking about the whole collaboration process. But new types are hardware interfaces are also going to be part of the mix. Here's an interesting video of one such potential device (via Stephen Shankland of CNET news.com).

Jeff Han is a research scientist for New York University's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. Here, he demonstrates—for the first time publicly—his intuitive, "interface-free," [multipoint] touch-driven computer screen, which can be manipulated intuitively with the fingertips, and responds to varying levels of pressure.

This is cool stuff. There are actually simpler devices that are available for sale today, however, that could be useful for collaboration if they were cheaper, more widely deployed, and (therefore) software were widely available to exploit them.

Take for example Wacom's Cintiq (or a tablet PC). One of the things that I find really difficult about doing some things remotely is that I can't easily do a "napkin sketch." Yes, as my co-workers well know, it's going to be pretty horrid from an artistic perspective. But sometimes there no other comparable way to communicate a quick idea. Sure I can draw something with a mouse or a low-end graphics tablet--or sketch something on paper and scan it--but these are pretty awkward emulations of throwing something up on a whiteboard in a face-to-face meeting. A Cintiq or other form of directly writable monitor seems likely to become a pretty important ingredient in remote collaboration. I expect that the day will come, when such are cheap and ubiquitous, when people will find it hard to imagine that they ever lived without them.

Size Disconnects

I'm a fairly fervent supporter of the thesis that "the market" connects buyers and sellers pretty efficiently. But sometimes there are disconnects that make me scratch my head. Take the "standard" frame sizes and the "standard" print sizes.

Frames and mattes still tend to come in dimensions sized for age-old 8x10", 11x14", and 16x20" sizes--or any of a variety of other sizes that correspond to the photo paper sizes that I purchased over a quarter-decade or so ago. (These, in turn, tend to be oriented to large format 4" x 5" film--which is a bit more square than "35mm" film (24 x 36mm). Technically, 8x10 is a 1.25:1 aspect ratio vs. 35mm's 1.5:1.) Yet, inkjet paper has sizes that are more attuned to some traditional paper standards such as 8.5x11" and 13x19"(SuperB) (in the US). As a result, typical inkjet paper prints don't fit in standard frames. Furthermore, most people tend to think that the more rectangular formats (i.e. longer horizontal or vertical dimensions) are more attractive--all other things being equal. Therefore, it's not simply a case of the old "4x5" dimensions being better

I'd be interested in thoughts on this. But, as a practical matter, it means that I can't fit prints made with off-the-shelf paper in my inkjet printer into a standard frame. Perhaps most frame-able photos still come from more traditional photographic sources but I find this a bit hard to believe given the prevalence of inkjet printers and, at least to my eye, the superior aesthetics of wider aspect-ratio images.

Amazon Music Store in 2007?

Paul Lamere of Sun Labs, the principal investigator for "Search Inside the Music" has an interesting post with his thoughts about the rumors that Amazon may launch a music store shortly. Admittedly, this rumor has been around for a while, but Paul makes a very strong case for why it could be very significant--especially if the music isn't DRM-ed (as seems to be the current speculation).

Of course, much would depend on how many tracks Amazon could get access too; for example, eMusic doesn't have DRM but it's also lacking many of the big music hits--which still represent a lot of volume, Long Tail notwithstanding. However, that aside, Paul makes a good case for how Amazon's "focus on discovery" and metadata-oriented Web services could give them some real advantage. And he's absolutely right. As I've discussed before, rich--and automatically captured--metadata is an absolutely key ingredient filtering and ordering digital data, including music. (Amazon also has the social component down with user ratings, which could further enhance the value of digital albums and tracks.)

Amazon has a great set of web services built around their data. Using Amazon's web services, one can get access to book descriptions, book cover images, reviews, pricing information - just about any piece of data in Amazon's database is exposed via their web services. Exposing their data in this fashion places Amazon at the center of the online literary ecosystem. Any startup company that wants to be in a business related to books will use Amazon's API because it is easy, the data is of high quality and it is free. This is good for the startup, and even better for Amazon since all of those startups end up sending their customers to Amazon. Amazon is already a big part of the music ecosystem. They already have lots of data for music CDs that is available via their web APIs. They are probably the largest supplier of album art on the web. The Amazon part number - the ASIN - is used throughout the web as an unambiguous identifier for an album. Once Amazon starts to sell individual tracks, I would expect that Amazon will create an ASIN or an equivalent for each track in their database. This track-level identifier may become the primary way of identifying tracks in the music world since Amazon makes it so easy to get all of the information about an item once you have the ASIN. This could be a key enabler in the next generation of music - a ubiquitous song ID tied to deep metadata.

Paul concludes that "in 2007 we may see the tipping point for digital music and Amazon may be at the center of it all."

More on Microsoft's Live Search

Over the weekend, I spent some time digging a bit deeper into the seeming anomalies with Microsoft Live search results that I discussed last week.

My original intent was to take a purely quantitative approach. I planned to search using the names of a few people who I knew would have quite a few articles, blog posts, and/or quotes that would mention Microsoft--as well as many that didn't. And then I would simply summarize the results of those searches run using Live, Google, and Ask, and thereby see if there was a pattern of differences--and specifically if "Microsoft" continued to appear more frequently in the Live results than in the others.

This methodology turned out to be problematic. One problem is that many of the results are "dynamic content." For example a CNET news.com page might list a changing set of stories on the side of the page--which could include stories with a Microsoft-related headline. Who knows what specific contents were present when the page was spidered by a given search engine. A similar issue occurs with dynamic blogrolls. In addition, some searches pointed to the main page for a blog--which has many posts (and therefore is much more likely to contain any given search term). It doesn't seem that this should really be "scored" the same way as a search result that returns a specific post. Finally, not all the search results were relevant (i.e. some pointed to different people); the engines varied in this respect, which would have added further noise to data based solely on counting occurrences of "Microsoft." Thus, I went back to a more impressionistic approach.

My results probably are still the oddest. I discussed the image search in last week's posting. In Web search, it's the two top results that are the real outliers. Microsoft is prominently mentioned in the #1 and #2 results for Gordon Haff: www.illuminata.com/perspectives/?p=79 & www.illuminata.com/perspectives/?p=93). These are individual posts and neither is returned anywhere near the top by either Google or Ask. Other Live results that include mention of Microsoft (e.g. www.desktoplinux.com/articles/AT7106426180.html and bitmason.blogspot.com/2006/05/ email-collaboration.html) are also returned by at least one other search engine.

I also ran searches using a couple other names. A search on Stephen Shankland (all searches were run at about 5PM on January 6) also returned Microsoft in the top two results--including a headline: news.com.com/2061-10795_3-6132156.html and news.com.com/2061-10808_3-5973412.html. However, Google also returned a number of high-ranked hits that included "Microsoft" (starting in the #3 position).

My conclusion after relooking at the results I described last week as augmented by these other search results? There are still puzzling oddities although nothing that I would call a smoking gun that proves systematic bias toward search results containing "Microsoft." The results produced by the search on my own name continue to be particularly hard to explain, given that they point to specific posts about Microsoft that are not highly ranked by any other search engine that I examined. However, it's also true that my admittedly limited testing using other names didn't turn up other examples that were anywhere near as compelling. I'll be interested to see if anything else turns up on this, but for now I'm just moving it to the "that's weird" bucket.

Five Things You (May) Not Know About Me

OK. I've been tagged for the blog meme/chain letter of the moment. I try to assiduously avoid such things. And I definitely don't have any photos as amusing as a very fresh-faced Catherine with Ozzy Osbourne. Nonetheless, for you Catherine, here we go. "Five Things You Don't Know About Me." (Most of which shouldn't be particularly surprising to anyone who has really dived into my website.)

1. Out of engineering school, I designed offshore drilling rigs. In addition to spending a lot of time in shipyards and flying around in helicopters, I worked on various mechanical subsystems (including piping systems such as ballast control) on the Ocean Odyssey which is now an equatorial satellite launch platform.
2. During c. the nineties, I spent much of my free time developing DOS software (shareware and freeware). Although I wrote a variety of things, I spent most of my time on a file manager called "Directory Freedom" that grew out of a couple of PC Magazine utilities and some subsequent work by Peter Esherick of Sandia Labs. It clocked in at a whopping 39KB because it was written in x86 assembler. (Shudder....) I sometimes get emails from people who (still!) use it--which is nice.
3. When I was at Dartmouth, I helped found The Dartmouth Review, an alternative (conservative) off-campus newspaper that recently celebrated its 25th anniversary. I also created the last word quotes column; at one point I tried to get a compilation published as a book, but didn't find a publisher.
4. I've climbed 20K ft.-plus peaks including Island Peak in Nepal and Cotopaxi in Ecuador. I haven't done this recently because I've been recuperating from a broken foot that I suffered in the Grand Canyon.
5. And (most obscure, but probably least interesting), I grew up right next to a Nike Hercules base West of Philadelphia (very near where Unisys is today--Burroughs at the time) in an old farm house. (Which should have keyed me into the issues associated with old farm houses such as the one in which I'm now living--but I digress.) This was the PH-82 site--later purchased by the University of Pennsylvania and now a housing development.

Tag: Stephen Shankland, Stephen O'Grady, Bob Sutor, Irving Wladawsky-Berger, James Governor.

Microsoft Live Boosting "Microsoft" in Searches?

Google has been taking some heat recently. As Blake Ross notes: "Google is now displaying “tips” that point searchers to Google Calendar, Blogger and Picasa for any search phrase that includes “calendar” (e.g. Yahoo calendar), “blog” and “photo sharing,” respectively." These tips aren't part of the search results themselves, but they appear above the search results and therefore arguably even more prominent than the #1 search result.

Google has also been criticized of late for advertising its own products using AdWords. Although it makes its ad buys using the exact same mechanism as anyone else, a lot of people still feel that it's not a level playing field if Google is simply taking money from one pocket to put it in another.

However, none of this involves "Google-biasing" the search results themselves. Contrariwise, I had a very interesting experience over on Microsoft Live image search earlier today. I searched for my name (Gordon Haff) and the top result was... unexpected.

The first result is indeed associated with me; it's an ad that I used to illustrate this Illuminata Perspectives entry. What is manifestly curious however is that this posting just so happened to be about Microsoft!

Was it perhaps because this particular posting of mine was so overwhelmingly popular that it just percolated to the top of the search rankings? I think that unlikely. I can go for page after page of Google Image search without this image appearing. Ditto for Ask.com.

Did the presence of "Microsoft" and/or other keywords boost this particular result way up in the standings? It certainly seems so. Which would be a big no-no indeed if you're ostensibly providing unbiased search results.

[UPDATE: In regular web searches on Microsoft Live, my Blogger profile is the #1 entry. However, the #2 and #3 entries in a Gordon Haff search also feature "Microsoft" prominently even though they are nowhere near the top in other search engines.]

[UPDATE #2: Google Tips are apparently gone, at least for now.]

Adobe Digital Photo Guides

John Nack on Adobe has links to a scad of downloadable digital photo guides:

Adobe has commissioned a number of digital photography guides from industry heavy hitters, covering everything from metadata to color management, digital workflow to black & white conversion. The complete list with links is in this post's extended entry, so check 'em out when you have a sec.

I haven't checked them out in detail, but there looks to be a lot of interesting material here.

The Next Search

Paul Lamere is the principal investigator for an interesting project over at Sun Labs called "Search Inside the Music." It's stated goal is "to explore new methods of categorizing, indexing and organizing large collections of music to allow more effective ways of searching through these collections." I know that I have an ongoing background task to add metadata to my music as a way to create useful playlists semi-automagically, but it never seems to be enough. So anything along these lines that worked well would a real nice-to-have. 

The project focuses in part on using acoustical similarity algorithms to help group together music. The idea is that if you like, say, Jefferson Airplane you may like other music with that psychedelic rock sound. What's just as interesting though is that Paul's project is now also looking at using social data to recommend and organize music based on the preferences of those with similar music tastes.

In fact, over on his blog, Paul makes the provocative statement:

Recommendation is the next 'search'. Companies are trying hard to give people good recommendations - the web is becoming populated with music recommenders  such as last.fm, myStrands, Qloud, and iLike. Companies like netflix are offering million dollar prizes for improved recommendations.   If you are building a site with lots of content - whether it is music, video, blogs or dinner recipes - you will do well to include a recommender. 

I've been a bit cool to the whole tagging phenomenon especially when it comes to attaching metaphysical significance to, e.g., a tag of "film" vs. a tag of "movie." (Folksonomies was one term from the early tag hype that--fortunately--seems to have departed the stage after its 15 minutes.) However, as these various networks of music, photos, bookmarks, video, etc. grow, human recommendations and rankings are clearly emerging as at least one important way of making sense out of the stupefying quantity of data in the network.

Sharing and Selling Photos

A few months back, Wired Magazine published a rather breathless article on crowdsourcing, "[t]he new pool of cheap labor: everyday people using their spare cycles to create content, solve problems, even do corporate R & D." I'm unconvinced by the significance or scalability for much of the crowdsourcing described. Amateur videos look, well, amateur for the most part.

And other efforts such as Amazon's Mechanical Turk haven't really gone anywhere. (The idea behind Mechanical Turk is that computers are truly bad at some things--such as recognizing objects in photos--that just about any person can do easily. But, as the article acknowledges, the real "killer app" hasn't appeared; perusing the current listings turns up more ordinary tasks that people are somehow hoping to get done for rates way below minimum wage.) Egoboo-style work is a cousin to crowdsourcing but it assumes there's a desire among (competent) people to contribute their time for free.

But one area where crowdsourcing does seem to have had some material impact is stock phoography. iStockPhoto is perhaps the best known of the so-called "micro-stock" sites. Pricing? From $1 for "web-ready" resolution up to $20 or $40 for the highest resolutions. (In other words, dirt cheap by normal stock standards.) Photos on the site are inspected for quality and other issues (such as trademarked logos and such). Model release forms are also required for any recognizable faces. In other words, buyers can have reasonable confidence that what they see is what they get without any surprises lurking. In my view, this is a big reason why micro-stock from a company like iStockPhoto is more attractive than other forms of crowdsourcing. The photos are known quantities and the transaction to buy them is as simple as pointing and clicking. (Getty, a large traditional photo stock agency, bought iStockPhoto--apparently in the "if you can't beat them, join them, vein.")

I'd just add that I think it a mistake to conflate all amateur and semi-pro photo sites as Scoble does in this post or to confuse the needs and desires of amateur photographers with those of professional art directors using photos. A site like Flickr is far more about sharing photos and interacting with a photographic community than it is about selling photos. Indeed, Flickr does nothing to facilitate such sales; it's up to a potential buyer to contact the photographer directly. There's nothing wrong with that--and, indeed, I can see a graphics professional coming across some perfect photo for a project in Flickr--but it's not really Flickr's purpose.

Although other sites, perhaps most notably smugmug, try harder to strike a balance between photo sharers and photo sellers, there tend to be rather fundamental differences in priorities and preferences between professional stock photography and amateur art and play. It's not a matter of gear or talent, but between producing and packaging photos in a way that they can be easily sold to users of stock--or in a way that meets our own needs and desires. 

Adobe Soundbooth Beta

As readers of this blog know, I've been working with the beta of Adobe Lightroom. I see that Adobe now also has a beta for a new piece of software called Soundbooth, which they describe as "a brand new application built in the spirit of Sound Edit 16 and Cool Edit that provides the tools video editors, designers, and others who do not specialize in audio need to accomplish their everyday work."

I don't do a lot of work with audio but perhaps this will provide the incentive for me to bring over some bits and pieces of analog media that I don't want to chuck but which I can't replace in digital form.

Shipping Luggage?

Given that I'm hopping around the country on crutches at the moment--owing to a broken foot--an ad for The Luggage Club in the airline magazine caught my eye. (BTW, the TSA seems to be at a complete loss as to how to handle passengars with crutches; among other things, your carry-ons--including laptop taken out of its case--are left lying on the conveyor table to crash to the ground or walk away while they conduct their hand inspection of you. But that's another rant.)

I've discussed some other possible consequences of carry-on restrictions before. Apparently, they've also been a boon for the luggage shipment business according to this LA Times article. I do note that my flight from Boston to Las Vegas, looking to be predominantly vacation travelers, had very lightly loaded overhead bins--something I last remember from, well, never.

Unfortunately, the door to door services are--as might be expected--pricey. Indeed, The Luggage Club doesn't even provide any pricing guidelines on its site that I can see; the aforementioned LA Times article says to expect about $100 per bag each way. The site also suggests that the service is marketed toward some fairly specific classes of users--people with bulky sports equipment like golf clubs or scuba gear or businesses with tradeshow material.

So, nice idea. But, given that we're no longer living in Internet Boom 1.0, it's an idea whose economics make it a niche.

Skirmishes on Second Life Shores

The tension between the Professional and the Amateur, the Commercial and the Personal, the Pradmatic and the Uncompromising pervade today's Internet. I've written about this conflict before--both in the context of the current imbroglio over the GPLv3 draft and more generally.

Now this very real world conflict is arriving at the shores of the  Second Life virtual world--with the same intensity and emotion with which it has been fought and is being fought elsewhere. Take this reaction by Urizenus Sklar to the launch of Crayon, a new marketing company, within Second Life.

For two and a half years I watched Second Life residents work like dogs, often without remuneration to build the wonderful mind-blowing place that it is today. All forms of fantastic structures and vehicles emerged in the space, from psychedelic cities to dark medieval fortresses to delicate gravity-defying elven castles. Artificial life forms appeared, reproduced and evolved in gorgeous gardens, while the skies were dotted by magnificent and elegant otherworldly flying machines. Virtual sporting events ranged from elven archery tournaments to giant snail races.

 In Februrary of 2006, I took a sabbatical from Second Life to pursue other projects. When I returned eight months later I was flabbergasted by what I saw. Second Life, now with 1 million subscribers, was being invaded by an army of old world meat-space corporations, ranging from Reebok and American Apparel to GM and Nissan. The traditional newsmedia was hyperventilating in its awe of the old meat-space corporations and the "innovative" things they were doing in second life, and could not stop writing about it...

 Most disgusting of all for me, however, was when the "new media" consulting firm Crayon announced, three years into the life of Second Life, that it was going to be the "first corporation to launch in Second Life." In a press release they claimed to be offering a "new way of thinking" and called their new corporation a "mash-up", a term that I found descriptive of their press release, which was a word salad jargon-fest. What was clear from the language of their announcement was that they had absolutely no idea about the history of Second Life, nor what it was about. No doubt the "launch" – in reality a public relations stunt to feed back to the meat-space world – was a great success; meat-space corporations would hire these posers to represent them because they must be on the bleeding edge: gosh golly, they "launched" in a video game!

 Incensed by these events, I unloaded on the PR firms in the Herald, accusing them of being "a bunch of desperate clueless fucktards trying to show how bleeding-edgy they are." Of course after my critical post came the defenders of Crayon etc. accusing me of being opposed to the future, and having a "potty mouth" and sounding "like a lunatic." But this wasn't the future calling: you don't blaze a path to the future by charging into a new space and ignoring what is happening around you, nor by recycling your old rust belt industrial design ideas in a new medium, and more importantly, if the discourse of cyberculture offends your delicate ears, then just keep the fuck away thank you very much.

For the whole thing and some additional commentary, see this post on the Strumpette PR blog.

I've little interest in choosing sides here. However, I think it's fair to say that the more successful communities almost inevitably go commercial at some level or, at least, (as in the case of Wikipedia) have to deal with the glare of some bright and probing lights. Given this, it's natural that we'll see ongoing splinters of counterculture splitting off from the Web 2.0 or Virtual World or whatever success stories as they inevitably go mainstream as a result.

Who Uses Yellow Pages?

Robert Scoble writes that: "I don’t even know where mine are. I’d hate to work there, although there’s still money left in that old model cause there’s still lots of people who don’t look to their computers for everything."

I only partially agree. I don't use Yellow Pages nearly as much as I used to, but they're still pretty handy for tracking down what I might call "location-dependent services"--i.e. a local plumber, furnace repair guy, or nearby tree nurseries. Part of the issue in using the computer is that many of these types of businesses don't have Web presences. For this reason and others, Web tools that provide results based on physical location, such as Google Maps, are fairly incomplete relative to the Yellow Pages. (The fact that the Yellow Pages are close to a de facto monopoly in any given locale helps them aggregate essentially all the relevant local advertisers. Google's market power notwithstanding, location-based search and directories in the online world are far more fragmented.)

I don't dispute that, in general, the (physical) Yellow Pages have declined and will continue to decline in importance--if for no other reason that if I'm having trouble tracking some item I need down, I'll simply go online and buy it if possible. However, given that searching based on location is yet something else that search doesn't do well today--see this posting here for a description of some other problems--the big yellow book provides at least an interim alternative.

Animated Knots

I use a fair number of knots in my various outdoor activities, but I tend to forget all but the most common when I haven't used them for a while. Animated Knots by Grog has great animated, step-by-step illustrations for dozens of different knots. This is definitely one of those cases where I think the computer can go beyond what is possible on the printed page.

Hat tip to Cool Tools.

Java Unit Conversion Calculator

I've been playing around with some Java programming using Sun's NetBeans 5.5 IDE, primarily for the Matisse GUI builder. As a programming exercise, I reimplemented a little Unit conversion calculator (things like inches to feet as well as a lot more exotic stuff) that I originally wrote and sold as a Windows shareware application way back when. Unfortunately, that app used some old Win16 libraries so it was sort of broken on current systems.

In any case, this new app largely recreates the previous version's function and it's in Java, so it should run on anything with reasonable graphics that has J2SE 5.0 or later installed. I've tested it on Windows XP and SUSE LINUX 10. It could still stand some polishing; e.g. it doesn't have an installer. But it appears to basically work. You can download it here: jconvert02.zip.

Further Thoughts on Adobe Lightroom

I took a look at the Beta 3 of Adobe Lightroom a while back. I've been working with Beta 4 (on Windows) over the past few weeks. My take? Progress, but much distance left to cover and some nagging concerns.

First, to the progress. Performance is significantly improved. I had actually given up on trying to use Beta 3; it was just too slow. (On a middling but respectable Athlon 64 3000+ with 1GB of memory.) While Beta 4 isn't quite a speed demon, it's certainly usable--which tends to alleviate my concerns that the performance issues were something fundamental and architectural. I would hope that performance improves still further by the time the product is released, but at least it's getting into the ballpark now.

Now for the bad news. And, yes, it's still a beta. But a quick perusal of the forums paints a pretty clear picture of a product that still needs a lot of work to improve reliability and squash bugs. However, likewise, I have no reason to believe these won't get fixed by the time the product is released--assuming that Adobe takes the time to do so. Not that I've been using the program heavily, but I have imported several thousand images and used them to process several hundred images for a big flickr upload session. And it's held together for me quite well.

In fact, my bigger concerns are not whether Adobe can get this program working and tuned. I think that's likely. Rather, I still have some of the same questions that I had after I looked at the program the last time. I still have an issue with the way the program essentially treats the photos in a completely separate organizational metaphor and classification scheme than the one on the disk. Given that Lightroom (and Photoshop) certainly won't be the only applications I use, I can't say I really like this approach. Perhaps I'll adapt or otherwise find a comfortable way to slip Lightroom's metaphors and workflow into mine--but that's perhaps the bigger concern for me than the performance and bugs of the moment.

Canon Missing a Midrange Mark?

Not that I'm in the market for a replacement for my Canon Powershot G5 (about which I've written recently) but, out of a sort of proprietary interest, I still like to see what Canon's doing with that part of the line. For those not steeped in Canon's digital camera product line, the Gx is essentially the high-end of Canon's more-or-less pocketable digital camera. A large pocket to be sure. It also has a fair degree of manual control, a moderately fast lens, and a usable (if not exactly great) viewfinder. It also supports RAW mode, a camera-specific storage format that preserves the maximum amount of image data for later processing in the PC. It's ubiquitous is digital SLRs and the like but far less common in lower-end models. I think of my G5 as occupying a tier between true "point and shoots" and SLRs--albeit without fully allowing a traditional "rangefinder" level of control. Which is one of the things I like about it and, frankly, is a category of camera that largely disappeared in latter film days.

The G7 continues to improve on its predecessors in the expected ways. More pixels, more sensitivity, bigger zoom. It's abandoned it's rotating and pivoting screen in favor of a fixed, larger screen--which I may or may not find a reasonable tradeoff; the G5 design was sort of nice and I actually found I didn't use the screen for a lot of applications--just the optical viewfinder. It would be nice if that viewfinder were improved; it's not obvious one way or the other from the photographs. Although the lens is still fairly fast (f2.8), the f-stop range remains fairly narrow (f2.8-4.8)

Perhaps most disappointing, however, is that the G7 drops RAW mode. Dpreview speculates that this is to protect the sale of entry-level digital SLRs--presumably they're referring to non-interchangeable lens DSLR's here. That seems plausible; after all the electronics can't cost much and with the ongoing increase in flash memory densities, RAW should be a better fit with a wider range of camera rather than a poorer one. However, whatever the reason, it seems a bad idea. Canon has a product line here that is very close to being a really nice "digital rangefinder." But it seems determined to remain merely close.

Utah Photographs

I finally go around to sorting and processing some Utah (Arches/Canyonlands/Moab area) photographs from last March and have them up on flickr.As I noted earlier, I imagine that this is going to be the primary way that I post most of my photos from now on. It just works--and the bandwidth's plentiful and the backups taken care of for me. I find that I create highly customized Web pages but rarely these days. In any case, flickr seems the lowest energy way to post photos unless I have the time and energy to really craft some web pages around a particular topic.

Flickr account

I've tended to create my own websites, or at least one-off web pages for my photos, but I've been revisiting some of the way I do things in light of the wide variety of free, or inexpensive, services. To that end, I've setup a Flickr account. I'll probably continue to put together trip collections in a somewhat more organized manner, but I figured this would be good for the odds and ends.