Month: January 2006

I finished Robert Sawyer’s Factoring Humanity several days ago. I enjoyed it, as I did the other Sawyer novel I read last summer. Also set in Toronto, Factoring Humanity blends human interaction — a marriage between university professors that family crisis has damaged — with three of the most challenging scientific problems in the world. (One wasn’t enough?) The novel is set in the “near future,” but it feels very “near” in most ways.

The scientific challenges:

• Artificial intelligence
• Quantum computing
• Search for extraterrestrials and understanding them once found

The husband creates a computer-based artificial intelligence program (Cheetah) which disappoints him in its inability to reach “humanity,” but the AI demonstrates more than expected. The husband is clearly quite a computer scientist, because he’s also nearly achieved quantum computing, to the point that he’s offered millions of dollars to sell his research to those who hope to take advantage of the ability to break the highest levels of current encryption. How he even has time to write the grant proposals to get money for his grad students and still do research/teaching of his own is beyond me!

But the wife really delivers, as she deciphers the alien messages that have been puzzling researchers the world over for years, and goes on to build the device described in the messages, and… well, read it yourself. I’m deliberately skipping a key, interesting subplot.

The strange part of this well-told tale is that many know the alien intelligence story quite well already. It’s Carl Sagan’s Contact, at least as performed by Jody Foster in 1997. Sagan wrote the novel (Wikipedia, with spoiler) from which that movie was made. The story is not identical, but the way in which the excitement of unveiling the meaning of the message and then making contact is described, the similarities resonated immediately. I wasn’t upset, but I do wonder about influences (this wasn’t mentioned on the author’s website).

Karma does win out. I introduced Vin to Sawyer, and he’s gone through several of Sawyer’s books. When I return Factoring Humanity to Vin, I’ll be asking for others.

The Matador was quick mental candy. If you’re in the mood for that (we were), it suits. Just don’t raise expectations. Metacritic shows a score of 65, generally favorable.

Scoble riffs on Dave Winer’s wishes for the venture capital industry with The “ventures” we need…. It’s a top 10 (OK, 11) list, but #7 reaches too far.

7) Venture ideas. I’ve hung around the industry now to realize that there are a few people who generate far better and far more ideas than anyone else. Microsoft has one of those guys. His name is Eric Horvitz. He owns the most patents at Microsoft and I believe he has about twice the number of the person who is in the #2 spot. Now, you probably couldn’t afford him full time (I’m sure that other multi-billion-dollar companies even regularly bid against us for his time) but you might be able to, say, rent Dave Winer or Steve Wozniak or, even, Matt Mullenweg, to come out and give you some ideas for a day. So, “venture IG’s” (Idea Generators) will be sought after.

Ideas are not what’s lacking. Execution, talent, stubbornness, focus, and leadership are the currency, in combination, which convert into excellent businesses. Ideas are sprinkled, for free, throughout the industry. Yes, having an idea first counts for something… a slim head start. Not much more.

The rest of the list is a reasonable extrapolation of where things might go. But let’s remember that people (and their organizations) don’t change as fast as the technologies which make this type of “venture” possible.

I’m looking forward to attending the 2006 Media Summit – New York on February 8th and 9th in New York City. I’ll be representing CNET Networks on a Thursday panel, “Internet Video, Advertising & Marketing: The Next Generation of Consumer Reach.”

Between CNET Video (RSS feed) and CNET News.com Video (RSS feed) and all that’s going on with GameSpot Video and ZDNet Whiteboards, there’s a lot of possibilities. I’ll keep it short and sweet.

Most important reason to mention this? See who I might bump into in New York, despite the tight turnaround.

Just came across this NYTimes article, “Like This? You’ll Hate That. (Not All Web Recommendations Are Welcome.),” courtesy of Scott Karp.

LivePlasma has been around for more than two years. I’m biased, but I have to wonder if this attention was triggered by the Big Picture, which was created in collaboration with the LivePlasma folks.

Nirvana is still out there. Point me in the right direction, please.

I haven’t been reading Paul Montgomery before, but I just came across Feature lists for News 2.0 (via Steve Rubel), and that’s one nifty chart. I wonder how all those News 1.0 sites measure up? 😉

When you get into feature checklist mode… it’s time for someone to make qualitative judgments about the entire experience. I have heard of several of these, but not used them all.

There’s also a useful link to Rich Skrenta’s post from a week ago about the funding going into news startups.

Mustapha from ZDNet France was kind enough to answer answer my plea for a Newsvine invite, and now I’ve found time to gather my thoughts.

Newsvine gets many things right. I just don’t know if that’s enough.

The Newsvine team built a content management system for the new media world, which is smart. Useful, human-readable (and guessable!) URLs are built into the system. Revenue incentives for participation are built into the system from the start, rather than bolted on later. (That will save aggravation down the road, certainly.) Content from all sources is treated natively. Simplicity in the design is consistent. I liked what I saw.

Read I am dismayed that the recent Nature article on how web users make snap decisions (50 milliseconds) is already behind a paywall. But I’ll link to it anyway in this context because with Newsvine, the entire introductory experience felt really good until I got to the home page, the front door of my news experience. Then Newsvine felt much the same as other news sites, visually. That’s probably a good thing in some regards (we’re all perviously trained to some degree) but the importance, and distinctiveness, of the “Vine” (reader-contributed material) is not made apparent.

Seed is the term Newsvine uses for sharing/submitting a link for others to follow. Since this contribution has a much lower bar than Write (see below), I expect the greatest value to the “Vine” to come from its Seeds. Of course, this is the area with the most competition, too. I watch the Digg phenomenon and don’t know whether the world has definitely changed, or whether another geek trend is running rampant among the digital early adopters without crossing over. (NOTE: Those who recognize which trends will cross over, and when, are very, very successful. I don’t claim to be one of them, though I’m paying close attention all the same.)

Write Is it the goal to get everyone who would otherwise start a blog, or join a blog network, to make Newsvine their oar in the water? Everybody’s a participant is the banner of the new wave, after all. Catch some of the next wave of participants without worrying about the reaction of the early adopters? (But then how do you reach a new audience?)

I admire putting everyone on an equal footing, and letting the best writers get the value, but with so many places to share opinions and more, I guess I wouldn’t bet on Newsvine being the platform of choice for that level of contribution. The really strong writers can get the same level of return elsewhere, I expect.

Specifics
A few tidbits…

• Nice animation of the voting action. Felt like the right speed… not too slow to be annoying, not too fast to make me wonder “what the heck happened?” or “did anything happen?”
• Smooth use of Ajax for the choice of domain: (CNET does something similar for username, another province with a limited namespace where repeated “that’s already taken” messages would be especially frustrating if a page re-load was required.)
• Love that everything is a feed. I’m not surprised, but it’s still worth noting.
• I’ve never seen the label JSS before. Newsvine doesn’t expand the acronym beyond giving a parenthetical (javascript) label. The feature is simply a Javascript call for inserting a feed into your site or blog without anything more than line of code. There are many, many examples of this kind of code. Newsvine has made it prominent and consistent. I wonder if JSS will take off as a label for this functionality?
• Only quibble with the Feeds section is so many choices: six of them. Yes, the granularity is welcome, but I’d suggest progressive disclosure of the complexity. There is always a best default choice for the reader. Make it.
• Audio and video may be second-order problems for Newsvine, but I didn’t see any audio or video, and I only came across images associated with AP stories. I admit it’s unfair to carp at a new service for not doing everything at once, but a lot of careful thought went into what’s showing, so I hope these are envisioned, if not yet implemented.
• Newsvine has great URLs, but if you have to teach people how to use your URLs as navigation, aren’t you expecting a bit much?
  

  “Tags are great for writers, but they are equally great for readers. Are you looking for news on Saddam Hussein? Just go to newsvine.com/saddam-hussein. No need to even search Google.” [Company info page, “Writing on Newsvine” section]

  I’d leave it as an Easter Egg, personally.

• The History tool is slick. I have one suggestion. Show me what I’ve read, in addition to the more explicit actions.

I’m in this same competitive arena, broadly, so I hope my biases are (a) clear and (b) not overly coloring my evaluation. I want new ideas to succeed. I’ve been working on online publications since 1993, and I think the medium still has a long way to go in addressing the human needs in the most satisfactory way. That challenge is one which I take personally, not just professionally. (Although the lack of design of my blog may give the opposite impression!)

I believe news organizations will benefit from the Newsvine lessons, and maybe even envy the content management system, but Newsvine looks like a solution in search of an audience at this point.

Please let me know if you’d like an invite. I won’t hand them out indiscriminately (read here for why), but if you’re reading this, you’re hardly a random stranger. 😉

So I saw some of the raves for Opera Mini, the new mobile phone web browser, especially Russell Beattie’s excitement: “Opera Mini: Best Mobile Web Browser Bar None.”

So I fired up the Treo 650, and used the installed web browser, Blazer (I think), and went to mini.opera.com. It was very smooth until the very last bit. The Opera server properly recognized my phone (due to the user-agent, I’m sure) as a Treo 650. I was offered a link to download the 210K .prc file, and the dialogs from there were smooth (not sure whether that’s Palm OS or Opera, or both).

I went to open Mini, and then I ran into the gap which blocks me from using it at all: “Please ensure that IBM’s WebSphere Micro Environment Java VM is installed.” Damn. How do I find a Treo-based method for (a) finding and (b) installing that? Palm.com, ironically, does no browser detect, and gives me a mobile-unfriendly site.

So I used Google on the phone. First result is a Palm support site, and the second result is an IBM site. Neither one offers a mobile download/install, so I’ll have to download to a computer and sync it over.

Curses… this was almost as easy as it’s supposed to be.

Anyone have a link directly to what I need? Is this something I can install via the current web browser on the phone?

Don’t have time to watch it tonight, but interested to learn via Ben Metcalfe that the BBC has put its 30 minute documentary The world according to Google online in full.

Overall, I’ve found the Bluetooth wireless keyboard and mouse experience with Mac OS X to be a mild improvement over the wired experience. The battery drain and replacement routine frustrates, but it’s only every few weeks, so it’s tolerable.

BUT I’ve now found a real aggravation. If I start my iMac G5 in Safe Boot mode, I can’t do anything because Bluetooth is disabled, so both mouse and keyboard are unrecognized. So I’ll need to borrow a wired keyboard and mouse (no, I didn’t keep them) tonight, and see then if Safe Boot lets me solve the problem.

Don’t encourage me to go wireless, Apple, and then leave me without a paddle when the stream gets a little “chunky.”

I want to use Safe Boot mode because I’m still working through my week-long (so far) odyssey to backup my data. Laptop is completed, but there appears to be something awry at low levels of the desktop disk. Everything works (knock on wood), so it hasn’t been a problem (yet?), but now I’m more eager than ever to backup.

Problem may have been triggered (or exacerbated) by enabling the Repair Permissions in SuperDuper after doing the recent iTunes update in Mac OS X 10.3.9, per Shirt Pocket:

The problem here is that you’re running 10.3.9 and tried to repair permissions after installing the latest iTunes update. Apple has caused some sort of problem when the new iTunes with Panther’s Repair Permissions code, and it causes the repair permissions code (inside OSX) to crash.

I’ve received significant, useful, clear support from Dave Nanian at Shirt Pocket through this entire week, starting even before I purchased a license (which I did do). Makes me happier with my purchase and a willing evangelist for SuperDuper.