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August 22, 2005
Susan Crawford — with whom I got to spend most of today, making me the luckiest person in several states — has been doing some most excellent blogging of foo. And I don’t think we went to any of the same sessions, so our coverage is additive. [Technorati tags: foo05]
August 21, 2005
Toni was at Oddpost, which was acquired by Yahoo a year ago. Oddpost had had to re-invent familliar backend pieces and would have preferred to have used Yahoo mail’s backend. “That was the beginning of the idea of opening up Yahoo more, creating the API’s.”
The first objection was abuse. Second: Rights. But “the lawyers and content providers are beginning to understand these issues.” In terms of terms of use: the APIs are open to anyone without restrictions, but when you hit a certain limit on the number queries, “you have to come talk to us”: How many queries do you need? Commercial or non-commercial? Would you put a “Powered by Yahoo” sticker on your site? Are you violating our terms of service, e.g., we don’t like metasearch apps. E.g., Voltage Networks built an anti-phishing toolbar; when you go to a url, it sees if it shows up in the Yahoo search index. If not, it flags the site. Voltage Networks gets a high query limit from Yahoo and put in a Yahoo search box.
The search APIs already get about a million queries a day from several hundred apps. They’re working on opening up Yahoo Calendar and Yahoo Maps. Yahoo Local is already open. [How about putting Yahoo Local data onto Google maps?]
“95% of our services are REST based” — Keeping it simple instead of over-engineering the APIs. “The deciding facto for us was the Amazon quote that 80% of their users are on REST and 80% of their support is for SOAP.”
The most exciting stuff coming up may be around mail, calendar and address book. He says it’s not a bout grand portals any more but about branded micro-content. [foo] Toni Schneider – Opening up Yahoo
AKMA and Margaret’s Si, if I may so term him, is on his way to Marlboro College, a wonderful school that grows genuine community out of an Athenian democracy (except the women get to vote, too). Good luck, Si! [Technorati tags: akma]
I woke up this morning in my tent in the orchard to the sound of a rooster, and I thought, “Goddamn it! Doesn’t he know it’s a weekend?”
August 20, 2005
Islamicate runs a msg from a friend traveling through Afghanistan as part of a circus. A snippet:
Along the way, Hamid, Du’ad, Nadir, Asad, Jamil, and Sher Khan have more than a dozen laughing fits. I’d never seen a group of Afghan men laughing playfully until this trip, even though it happens all the time here. They sing to the radio and clap until my ears echo with Indi and Afghan pop music. We stop along the way and squat by a river, eating fresh mangoes and watermelons, then for daily prayers. They tease me like a close friend and we break bread together at every meal, eating naan flat bread for breakfast, then potatoes, rice, oils, and naan for lunch and dinner.
[Technorati tags: afghanistan]
The wikiwyg demo from SocialText is getting close to the way you’d want a wiki to work. (Disclosure: I’m an advisor to the company.) [Addendum:] Adina Levin of SocialText points out in the comments that Wikiwyg is an open source javascript library… [Technorati tags: wikis SocialText]
Marti Hearst talks briefly about Flamenco, an early faceted classification system.
HB Siegel points us at IMDB’s tagging system, which is well hidden: www.imdb.com/keyword/murder.
Stewart Butterfield of Flickr and Tantek Çelik of technorati are also here.
Stewart points to the difference a plural makes: Check tags/wing/clusters and tags/wing/cluster.
Very interesting discussion… [Technorati tags: foo05]
Eric Bonabeau, of Icosystem, says that there’s much in life we recognize without being able to explain why. He says we’re great at detecting patterns but terrible at exploring alternatives. Let computers search and the humans do the evaluation. The computer then generates new alternatives reflecting the humans’ choices. He gives examples from car companies creating new designs, pharmaceuticals generating new drugs, etc. He also shows live demos of interaction with flickr and then Amazon: Select the closest results from a search and it generates returns that are closer and closer to what you want. E.g., if you select the Eiffel Tower photos that get returned from a search for Paris, it starts showing you more photos with the Tower. (It’s working on tags, not on the images.)
He ends with the question: Can this become a consumer application? Is it a new way of browsing?
In the last two minutes, Erix described a project Icosystem is working on for NASA. It combines multiple ingredient inputs with various preparation capabilities as a way of cooking recipes on spacecraft. The new possibilities are astronomical, in the 1015 range. (It’s the cover story of New Scientist.) [Technorati tags: foo05 EricBonabeau icosystem search]
Susan Crawford and I sort of moderated a discussion about how desperate is the situation and what we can do about it. Much of the talk centered on Susan’s idea for Net Day, the equivalent of Earth Day: How to talk about the day, how to get it out into the real world. (No time for details right now…) [Technorati tags: foo05]
Julie gives a talk called “Making Masks: Blogging as a Social Tool and Family Lifestyle” about the public and the private we choose to expose through our blogs. Are we projecting new personas?
Julie wrestles with the problem of how much to expose. She keeps some secrets because: 1. She wants to preserve the relationships in her lives; family members can feel betrayed by posts. 2. She wants to protect herself and her family. 3. There’s a place for privacy and secrecy. “There are moments to raw and personal to be trusted with others.”
So, why take the risk at all?
1. It establishes a chronicle that can be valuable for personal and social reasons.
2. Cross-pollination. We educate one another. The juxtapositions can be revelatory.
3. Creativity.
4. In crises, bloggers can share information and provide mutual support.
5. Crossroads. We learn we’re not alone.
[The above boils away the best part of this terrific talk.] [Technorati tags: JulieLeung]
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