The following is a bunch of predictions. Mark my words. Three areas to pull out your wallet for.
On par with Radiohead and Bjork, Xiu Xiu is an amazing project.
I had a hard time with it at first. Remember when you were a kid and didn’t like onions? or coffee? Xiu Xiu is a savory experience.
I borrowed all of Xiu Xiu’s albums from friends. It’s definitely going to inform my own art.
Production-wise, Xiu Xiu is some of the most interesting stuff I’ve heard that isn’t clearly “avant garde.”
Just google it. Great music vids on YOuTube too.
In Response To: gdgt roundtable – Palm Pre (gdgt is currently hiding their permalinks so… sorry)
Some things to consider…
With the G1 on T-Mobile and the Pre on Sprint, I think both carriers now have something comparable to what AT&T offers its subscribers with the iPhone. Verizon has the Blackberry Storm too, but I’m not really going to talk about Blackberry accept for saying that they had better step it up.
The problem with Sprint is its underdog status… But more importantly, many people are locked into their carriers because of coverage issues Etc. When I lived in NYC, Sprint was awesome. Here in the boonies outside of Sebastopol, CA, AT&T is the only choice for reliable service.
The G1 runs Android, a Linux distro that Google is promoting. The Palm Pre runs WebOS, a Linux Distro thaty Palm is promoting. The iPhone runs some sort of bastard version of OSX which is a version of Unix (a proprietary version of Linux basically).
One of the main attractions of the iPhone is the availability of add-on apps.
I wonder which systems(s) will prevail once all of these devices are available on all carriers.
The best apps will probably be available on all three systems with development for the Linux-based ones probably being easier and cheaper than for than Apple OS, since it’s proprietary.
Another thing that doesn’t seem to be addressed by the good folks at gdgt or anywhere else:
Unlike other mobile OS’s or basically anything we’ve ever seen before in mainstream computing, Linux itself is an Open-Source project. Linux distros are community-driven. They are inherently democratic in their evolution. For this reason, I don’t think Android and WebOS are competitors. I think they are both contributions to Linux that we should thank Palm and Google for. And there’s no reason in my opinion that Android can’t look like WebOS and vice versa. Perhaps the best of Android and the best of WebOS will come together in the coming years.
Also, I have to say that I don’t believe there’s any sustainable reason for UI design standards to be different from system to system or from OS to Web. At the end of day, WebOS is one of the smartest things ever, given that it’s based on HTML, CSS and Javascript. Add Flash and Silverlight (or whatever) and there’s very little you can’t do, while your development efforts scale across OS’s… I think this kind of change is inevitable as we move toward a cloud computing world. I’m glad to see someone stepping up to make it happen. Good job, Palm.
The following is a little illustration in the form of a hypothetical scenario of why I think that individual behavior makes a big difference. I end up giving this example to just about everyone that I end up discussing my personal philosophy with. The hypothetical scenario is not something I invented, but I can’t remember where I got the idea. I’ve surely altered it a bit but the point is what is important.
[beginning of story]
Imagine a small town. In this small town, everyone has more or less the same ideas about how to behave and treat one another.
In this town, it’s understood that if you were to find money on the ground outside the local grocery, you would turn it in because that’s what everyone has always done. And in turn, if a citizen of the town got home from the market and realized that she didn’t have in her pocket the twenty-dollar bill she had left the store with, she would likely call or return to the store, quite confident that one of her neighbors would have noticed the bill on the ground in the parking lot and turned it in to the management of the store.
Now imagine that you [addressed to you the reader] moved to this nice little town. And one day you come across a twenty dollar bill on the ground outside of the local grocery. You pick it up and stick it in your pocket. That’s how things are done where you’re from. You just got lucky!
A while later, one of the town natives calls over to the store and is quite surprised to find out that no one has turned in the money he surely must have dropped between the market and his car.
At this point, in his mind, it is no longer necessarily an active custom of the culture of the town to turn in found money. In fact, later on, he reinforces this by not turning in money that he finds outside the market since he no longer believes that it is the normal thing to do.
Since you moved to this town, a chain-reaction has begun that will change what people think is the ‘right’ or ‘normal’ thing to do when they come across their neighbor’s accidentally misplaced money.
[end of story]
I know this is a fairly silly narrative, and I swear it comes across as much more believable and compelling in verbal communication, and I’m sure I could have written it more interestingly, but bare with me,
The idea is this:
The number of interactions we have with other humans in our lives that give us a real sense of how people behave is small. If you’ve ever visited a foreign place for a few days and left with the idea that “The people there are so friendly and helpful..” remember that it was probably only one or two interactions that gave you that idea. Maybe you were confused about a train map and someone offered to explain it to you. Maybe it was something else like that.
Later today, or tomorrow or next week, you might see someone who obviously could benefit from the help of a stranger, but you might be inclined to not help them because that’s not really how we do it around here. But if you do help them, in their mind, it’s likely that it will become the way we do it around here, and in turn they will be more likely to do the same kind of thing for others.
I believe that a lot of the time, people behave according to how they think other people behave. The good news (or bad news) is that the opportunities that people have to really get a sense of how people behave are few and far between.
So in the next 24 hours, something you do in your interaction with a complete stranger could actually have a fairly large ripple effect.
You can change how people act just by treating people differently.
As a major intaker of information about leading technologies, I am proud to say that at the time of the creation of this blog post, I am ahead of the game as far as declaring a change in the language we use to refer to the next phase of web evolution.
The term “web” has never been stronger. The “internet” goes on as something we mention almost every day. And the technologies that comprise the realm of what we have been calling semantic web, mainly markup standards, aren’t going anywhere.
But semantic web just fell out of favor as a [canditate for a] useful euphemism in our language. The moment this became obvious to me was a few weeks ago when I heard that Tim Berners-Lee spoke at TED and didn’t mention ‘the semantic web.’ A few weeks later I saw the video for myself and felt a certain sadness or abandonment when TBL talked about the geekiest dream ever, one that he created, without using the name I thought we had all agreed on for it, The Semantic Web. Instead, he used a different euphemism for the most awesome library system ever conceived. He called it “Linked Data.”
If you are a Semantic Web apologist like myself you might feel slightly deflated by a sudden change in terminology. I’m sorry. I’m sure TBL is sorry too.
But the reality is that “Semantic Web” is always going to be confused with Natural Language Processing, which is also a field of technology that is growing fast in its own right.
No sustaining buzz has really caught on with “the semantic web,” as a catch phrase, beyond us geeks that are already sold on the idea. Instead, we’ve recently heard more and more announcements (made usually by search companies) that include the word semantic as if the mere use of the word means that the company is doing something right.
The battle we’ve been fighting as SemWeb advocates is largely a battle for widespread awareness. TBL has said himself that the phrase semantic web wasn’t the best choice of words.
I’m sure TBL spent at least an afternoon considering what he might say to the audience at TED which arguably consists some of the most influential people in the world. I’ve concluded that he intentionally abandoned the phrase, in preparation for a brighter future in which the SemWeb technologies are no longer so easily confused with other technologies. We’ve changed our name.
If you feel the re-branding is unfair, consider who has more right to the word semantic, the Natural Language people or the Interchangeable Data Format people?
We lose.
Sorry. We need to move on.
The Semantic Web is now called Linked Data. It’s official. Take a deep breath, change your notes. And let’s move on as Linked Data enthusiasts, not Semantic Web enthusiasts.
I will lead this effort by removing the category of “The Semantic Web” from this site and replacing it with “Linked Data.” I’ll do it later this week. I need some time to say goodbye.
The music most people seem to accept as “Post-Rock” is instrumental music with long songs featuring rock-ish musicians grooving on a few chords and/or a motif, with a lot of dynamic variation and intensity for as long as an hour at a time.
For most people, the term “Post-Rock” has become synonymous with a certain aesthetic, long, slow-moving guitar-centric (largely diatonic) songs that swell and die out with musical sensibilities largely created in the seventies and eighties.
I want to extend the meaning of Post-Rock.
I think that Post-Rock might include (just a few ideas):
On the other hand, when a friend mentions “post-rock,” I usually assume what they mean is ‘long-boring-electric-guitar-music.’
If Post-Rock is a useful genre, I think we should include bands like The Fiery Furnaces. Otherwise we should just call it “Bedtime Music…”
I think Bjork is post-rock.
It looks to me like the Smartphone market is going to spear-head of a lot of improvements to personal computing.
Surely location-based services are going to make our lives a lot easier in many ways, and of course, these technologies are probably going to completely change the face of advertising. But the ubiquity of GPS, and in turn, the development of new location-based services is only one of the more obvious ways Mobile will likely evolve personal computing as we know it.
Here are two areas where I think the powerful mobile devices of the near future are going to be major game-changers.
1. The Race for Affordability and SPEED in Mobile Data Connections – It seems like the mobile phone carriers haven’t been doing much to grow or improve their coverage. It’s like there was an initial land-grab and for the past several years, whichever carriers are dominant in a given area have been left alone by the other carriers. For years now, in the tech news I consume, I’ve been hearing about small, experimental rollouts of WiMAX and other alleged 4G technologies, but as far as can tell, connectivity is just as crappy and overpriced as ever.
Smartphones are a real incentive for carriers to improve their networks. The days of dumb-phones are coming to an end. It wont be long before we all have , in our pockets, devices capable of streaming video in either direction. We will all be using ‘cloud’ services from our phones. The devices are going to be practically free, so if the current major carriers don’t make better and more affordable connectivity available, some one else will.
2. The Homogenization of Operating Systems - Linux is on the rise and JavaScript+HTML+CSS is proving to be an adequate way to build UIs (Thanks, Web2.0 Boom!). You don’t need to look far to see evidence that the languages the Web is built on may be most of what we need. One case in point is Palm’s “Web OS”, a mobile OS, the UI of which is totally done in JavaScript with HTML and CSS (and the backbone of the phone is all Linux) …Or how about Android? Again, Linux-based. I don’t see non-linux OS’s continuing to rule the Mobile OS space for long. It’s got to be just too tempting for Developers to write applications that will work on many devices rather than just one, especially when those Apps will be very easy to port to Browser-Based UI’s… What Smartphone 3 years from now will come without a browser?
So you see, the browser is a leak into the cloud. And devices/OSs that allow cloud Apps to run natively rather than through a browser window are appealing for users and developers. I just don’t see any way I could be wrong about this. Instead of your phone having a browser, imagine that your phone will be a browser. Right? You see? For instance, the settings pages on your phone are just little web pages hosted by a tiny server you keep in your pocket. Palm is on to something.
So the iPhone may stick around for a while, but I see a major uphill battle for for Apple or any other device manufacturer who wants to maintain complete control of what apps and services consumers can use.
I believe that the desktop computer and the desktop OS are going to move aside when it comes to what is really important to most people. Connectivity. Anytime, anywhere for anything. And rich Applications to go along with it. That’s what’s important. Your Mac OS or Windows can be virtualised.
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Here‘s a really cool Interview from the IT Conversations Podcast. This is part of Jon Udell‘s awesome series, Interviews with Innovators.
The guest Andy Singleton talks about ‘distributed’ software development teams and some of the common ways they get it wrong.
[Excerpted from IT Conversations:]
Andy Singleton is an entrepreneur who has long studied and practiced the art of distributed software development. Influenced by the open source and agile movements, he has arrived at some startling conclusions about how to manage commercial projects…
A few of the surprising Conclusions Singleton has made [excerpted from Jon Udell's Blog]:
Don’t interview. Just pay people to join a project, pull a task from the queue, and find out what they can do.
Don’t divide work geographically. You’re not making best use of your distributed team if you impose that artificial constraint.
Don’t do phone conference calls. “I’ve never had someone tell me: ‘I worked on a project with lots of conference calls, and it worked great, so your thesis is disproved.’”
Don’t estimate. It’s just extra work. If you know your tasks and priorities, go after them in order. Estimation won’t help, and will cost 10% of your time.
Pile on developers early. It enables people to self-sort, and yields a stronger and more flexible team at the two-week mark.
[Excerpted from IT Conversations:]
In this conversation [Andy Singleton] explains why not to do these things, and what to do instead.
If you make Art, you should watch this. If you don’t make Art, you should still watch it.
As a hardcore Linked-Data/Semantic Web Enthusiast for some time now, say since pre-2007 (back then, I didn’t know what to call it but I understood that it was possible), I can’t help but feel sometimes like it’s never going to happen. Sometimes a non-silo Web seems like a idealistic fantasy. Sometimes it seems like nothing is happening. During the first half of 2007, the amount of excitement in the Sem-Web Category of my feed-reader was high. Since then, however, the excitement level seems to have diminished quite a bit. Am I right?
I want to offer a few condolences and some evidence that the Semantic Web is not dead. In fact, I believe it’s still going to “happen.”
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