Ink-blots

A tardy Christmas present... ink-blot wallpaper for your computer

Wikipedia vs. Google

Looks like Jimmy Wales thinks he can create a "Google killer". We will see. I am betting on Google.

A Wikipedia search would be based on the "wisdom of crowds". Crowds are not perfect (and mobs are worse). Keep in mind...

1. The crowd can choose between Alice Cooper and Ashlee Simpson
2. Ashee sells more records to the crowd
3. The crowd CLEARLY is in error in this case
   
   

More free stuff

Yet another service offering a free wiki with some pretty darn good functionality... Zoho

More on online gaming taxes

If you buy the $3 an hour rate stemming from the potential value generated in the game, Everquest has a per-capita gross domestic product nearly as big as Russia's. World of Warcraft exceeds it.

This article does a very good job in explaining the concepts behind taxing the virtual gaming world. To oversimplify, the more you play and collect gold, Linden dollars, experience points, whatever... the potential value if you "cash out" (sell your accumulations on eBay for example) can be significant.

So, is it fair to tax potential value? If I was at home writing "Harry Potter Balboa", should I be taxed on what might happen regarding revenue, or would it be better to wait until it actually hit the market before I had to pay up?

I think, therefore IM

Interesting article on IM. 50% of teens IM and one in five have asked someone out on a date via this medium. Basically the differences between IM and e-mail are minor, but it seems like popping the "date question" plays out better in IM.

Wonder why. Both result in text on a screen... I guess the cultural expectation of a response (any response) is higher with IM.

My parents went to Iconistan and all I got was the stupid T-shirt

I really like declaring the terrority engulfing the bottom of so many webpages for social networking purposes as "Iconistan"

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/internet/0,72282-0.html?tw=rss.index

Clearly a nation in unrest and with shifting borders. At some point, market (or Darwinian) forces will have to come to bear to thin the growing numbers of icons out at the bottom of content.

Options are good, but too many options would seem to limit the benefits we can gain from these tools.

Regardless, I totally want to apply for dual citizenship in Iconistan! Would that make me an Iconistanian?

Down the YouTube

I find it hard to believe the Bank of America's YouTube embarassment will be the last we see of some frustrated performers who got stuck in a crappy executive job instead.

Yet another reason YouTube will keep stealing time from me.

Wii

Will the Wii provide some push to the next model on human/machine interaction?

Dunno, but maybe I need to get one to find out. Research only of course.

Another gem from wikihow

I gap in my life has been addressed... I now know how to appreciate Death Metal

Swarmapaloosa

I still don't totally get it, but swarmbots are pretty interesting to read about. This article on swarmanoids further interests and confuses me.

The concept of 60 autonomous robots working in a virtual space to accomplish tasks -- coupled with all the Second Life activity lately -- makes we wonder if the deepest we end up going with AI and the like might occur in a 3-D world via your browser.

Disappointing, but not surprising

It appears Second Life recently caught a case of ring worm.

The beauty of the Internet is everyone can get into the game, the downside is "everyone" includes some troublemakers.

Alice update

Random House is going to pay Alice Cooper $500,000 for his memoirs.

At least the book market sees the wonder that is Alice :)

Mind-machine interface

While the gear pictured in this article is far from stylish, and very likely to improve (one would hope), I wonder if indeed we are within five years of a profound new way to interact with the digital world.

A future with less blackberry-thumbing, mouse sweeping, tablet inking... sounds nice.

Wanna write a book?

Join some of your closest friends at Wharton and MIT and co-author the next big book on business use of social networking.

http://www.wearesmarter.org/

I bet they'll pass on my e-mail quota chapter.

Stay calm. The camel will eventually stop

I came across a great pair of sites that show the pros and cons of lower barriers of entry to publish content broadly... eHow and its sister site wikiHow. eHow contains vetted information, while anyone can publish at any time to wikiHow.

For awhile, my favorite wikiHow moment related to "How to have a fireworks show"... the tip - "wait until it is dark".

Then I read this jewel:

How to regain control of a spooked camel

which includes the pearl of wisdom: "Stay calm. The camel will eventually stop".

Score one for the vetters :)

Meet Ms. Dewey

I have no idea if the search results are useful, but I have fun trying them out

Ms. Dewey

Second Second Life

Just a bit more on the commerce in Second Life. Maybe I need to set up a foulballguy t-shirt stand there :)

Second Life

I have barely dipped my toe in the water on Second Life, but there sure seems to be something going on.

As mentioned in this article, Linden Lab, Second Life's publisher, estimates that the total amount of content being created by its users is equivalent to the output of 5,100 full-time programmers. You Tube is a movie factory, blogs a writing factory, podcasts a broadcast factory, and now this in Second Life:

• IBM is holding virtual meetings here
• Reuters has opened up a news outlet within the world
• and LOTS of commerce is going on

I still think Halo is a better platform for interacting (and resolving business disputes in a more... ummm... direct manner) -- as evidenced by the interviews conducted in This Spartan Life

Slow but sure

I have been working to get all my old posts moved over from my previous blog to this new location. Fairly tedious work. Hope to wrap this up in a week or two.

Go Bears :)

Memories

A long time ago, on a PC far far away... Start Me Up

More pointless fun

Sometimes the simpliest things can waste the most time....

http://www.florito.net/Wind_generators/applet/index.html

Four great Internet phenomena

Based on the purchase price of You Tube, I think it we would have to add it to this list, but here are four other VERY successful simple ideas that got over BIG TIME.

Raply - Browse and chat

Raply is an interesting tool to let you chat with other Raply users viewing the same page. Free, easy, and only mildly confusing :)

This is brought to us by the gang at Numly. Numly, along with docly and writely are all worth a peek when you have the time.

And the Web 2.0 winners are...

Not MySpace!

Wired has provided a list of their cut on Web 2.0 winners and losers. Interesting read. Minor quibbles from me on this list. Digg is not in the top 5. and MySpace is in the bottom 5. While I totally agree with their assessment of MySpace's shortcomings - especially the design trainwreck that nearly all sites display - I can't see how this is not still considered the 600 pound gorilla.

Who is even close to the user base of MySpace? If social networking is all about people... don't they kinda win??

Search party

New search engine out there that blends community with the search tool. Interesting.

www.chacha.com

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad - an unlikely blogger

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has his own blog. Once I clicked on the small, mildly defaced, American flag I was able to read his first (lengthy) post.

He also had a poll for readers to vote yes or no on America's intentions to start a world war. I am pretty sure the next poll wont be "who is you favorite Backstreet Boy"... but I will check to make sure.

The site even offers an RSS feed. Since Iran has the most sophisticated internet censorship systems in the world, not sure how necessary RSS is, but who am I to judge.

Personalized home pages

I still stick with the figure that only 10% of people will ever bother to personalize a home page. As Yahoo, Google and others develop their widgets to drop on your desktop, this seems to offer a carrot to get people to spend a bit of time providing basic information to better personalize content and apps.

So, does life begin at your browser default page or your desktop in the future? Desktop methinks. Eventually.

http://www.niallkennedy.com/blog/archives/2006/09/programmed-personal-homepages.html

More useless fun

Digg is becoming a very effective way for me to waste far too much time.

This was a fun discovery...

Ragdoll and Spikes

Dark matter... ummm matters

Read a good article that explained the universe is made up of about:

• 25 percent dark matter (matter does not absorb or emit light)
• 5 percent ordinary matter (planets, K-Fed,and basically everything else with mass)
• 70 percent dark energy (the force that is pushing the universe apart at an ever increasing rate, maybe K-fed fits here too)
  

My e-mail inbox seems to be overflowing with dark energy lately.

Poor Pluto

In a move that will undo the ruler-based nun training I received at a tender age, looks like we are moving from 9 to 12 planets. Pluto was on the bubble, but instead of hanging with the jock (Classical) planets, it now must live with being ranking member of the geeks (Plutons).

I bet UB313 is the first to get a swirly.

The purpose of the Internet

Sure you can book travel, social network, keep up on news, yada yada... but the Internet REALLY exists to provide you this.

Meet Chad Vader - Day Shift Manager

Good for Google

Google is now posting warnings about sites in your search results list that might behave badly

I am sure someone will have a problem with this - but I, for one, am glad to see it.

URLs gone bad

This got sent my way and I thought it was pretty funny.

URLs gone bad

Making fun look like work

Web pages (text heavy please) magically transform into office product clothing...

www.workfriendly.net

While one chicken might disagree...

Alice Cooper...

national treasure

Microsoft's "Windows Principles" are definitely worth a read.

Seems like some sound thinking, but nearly every article I read on these introduced them as the "non-binding Windows Principles". One would expect that this was not a radomly chosen adjective.

IM replacing e-mail?

Interesting article on IM turning e-mail into the next snail mail.

I am guessing this rings true... depending on your age and texting skills.

XBox Portable and the World Cup Head Butt

Of little or no redeeming value, but worth 2 minutes of your time...

XBox Portable and the World Cup Head Butt

Google and evil

After reading Lore Sjoberg's clever post on Google's mantra, I had a few other thoughts.

• If you plan to organize the world's data, offering a free (and useful) spreadsheet is a good start.
  
  
• I see to camps developing on search... (1) the Googlites, who say "damn the metatags - long live search algorithms!" and feel data utopia is only reached by math against the data itself -- and the (2) Boxers, who deeply believe we should apply 50 to 60 tags, ONLY from a defined list (created by the King Boxer I guess)
  

I am probably 90% Googlite, but figure some tagging (with flexiblity for the author to define the tags) is not all bad.

Is PowerPoint Evil?

Edward Tufte has declared PowerPoint as evil in this article.

I am not sure I can agree - although calling presentations "slideware" is pretty clever.

To harken back to the old "guns don't kill people, people kill people" mantra, I think it is more "PowerPoint isn't insipid, but the insipid can not be prevented from using PowerPoint".

And while taking no formal position on the former item, I always felt "guns don't kill people, bullets do" would have been more accurate.

But no one asked me.

Useless, but cute

The big difference between FireFox and IE...

One red paper clip meets Alice

An illustration of the power of blogs, and confirmation that Alice Cooper is a heck of a guy.

Wanna write a book?

The concept of being published continues to evolve.

You can agrue that a blog, MySpace, personal web pages, and so on... all enable someone with a few minutes, a degree of ego, and a desire to say something to be "published". I am not sure that "author by self-appointment" is resume material, but your words are available to others - so maybe it is of some note.

Or course, once out there, the market takes over (e.g. demand/interest in your ideas) and we enter territory much more familiar to Commecon. Anyway... if you want to convert your web musings to hardback or paperback, some pretty interesting options are out there such as: www.blurb.com

How geeky are you?

Geek test.

Just call me Mr. 42 (an emerging geek by their standards)

Wiki work - added some jargon

I totally love pbwiki.

Just added some jargon stuff to the Electronic Communication Commandments.

The visible hand

I am probably late to the party, but this looks like a pretty neat little tool to guide you to other related content - based on what you are viewing:

www.blinkx.com

They also offer some video search capabilities that I have yet to play with (beyond my usual "search on Alice Cooper" test):

www.blinkx.tv

Nice wiki software

Someone shared a very nice free wiki site with me and I wanted to pass it on:

pbwiki.com

Since my markup skills within this blog have been pretty sad, I thought I'd try to move some of my longer content into this forum (plus I can share the password and gain some help). Here it is:

commecon.pbwiki.com/FrontPage

Meta Wars

Just got back from a conference where a VERY vigorous debate was had over the value - or lack of value - in meta tags. Let's skip dwelling on how sad it is that passions could arise over such a subject.

Camp 1 - You must meta tag all content if you ever hope to find it, manage it, use it, and so on

Camp 2 - Camp 1 will require the user to input thousands of tags, people will revolt, chaos and so on. Bottom line, the context and linking of content should serve as the way content is found, used, managed, and so on.

Commecons's cut - Both camps should take a deep breath. Highly focused/organized content may well justify tagging - but PLEASE try and keep it to a minimum. Most content is best served by the context that develops around it. Let the market prevail when you can.

Supply side communications

1. Most information is useful to some people
   
   
2. Some information is useful to most people
   
   
3. Little information is useful to all people
   
   
4. The closer one is to the ownership of the information, the broader the appropriate audience appears to be

Unsafe at any processor speed?

Interesting questions raised in this post about the recent Windows security problem.

It is odd how we accept the frequency in crashes and need for patches to an operating system (Mac users too, by the way), when if our cable provider, cell phone company, gas company, chia pet, etc... had the same number of problems, we would show them the door.

Seems to me if hot coffee you place in your lap is a solid platform for litigational weath optimization... a blue screen should mean green too.

Just for fun

http://www.netdisaster.com/go.php?mode=meteor&url=foulballguy.blogspot.com

Pretty fun, huh?