Ned Gulley’s Blog. Resident buzzwords: synthetic biology, ambient displays, swarm robotics, wise crowds.
Posted in Uncategorized on Dec 22nd, 2004
Great holy creeping cows! This is an example of the unexpected harvest reaped by those who invest in web services. Flickr, the oft-commented-upon photo web site, has a nice web services API (application programming interface) to talk to their site. On the strength of this, a San Francisco company called Stamen Design built something called [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Dec 21st, 2004
Those Wikipedia people never stop to catch their breath. Every time I look up they’ve launched yet another flypaper knowledge collaboration. Sometimes I want to tell them, “there’s a whole lot of knowledge out there… you don’t have to do it all at once.” They’ve got wikipedias in Saxon and wiktionaries in Sanskrit. Now they’ve [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Dec 20th, 2004
Ever since I plugged into the blog network, I’ve liked the metaphor of blogs as neurons. Jon Udell here writes the essay I wish I had written: InfoWorld: The network is the blog. There’s a shorter summary of the same thing on Jon’s Radio.
Blogs are natural filters and amplifiers. Owing to the quirks of their [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Dec 16th, 2004
I have been waiting for someone to do this: use a cheap motion detector and an old cell phone to act as a low tech LoJack car theft detector. It’s a really simple concept: when the car starts rolling, it calls (or sends a short text message to) you, the police, or whoever you tell [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Dec 15th, 2004
All independent bookstores will soon vanish. I know this because Wordsworth Books recently closed. This was a well-respected independent book seller in a terrific location in the middle of Harvard Square in Cambridge, Mass. That’s got to be one of the most bookety-book-book places on the planet. And still! Ka-boom! There’s just no fighting it. [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Dec 13th, 2004
I am incredibly irritated with my iPod right now.
I just threw a big party (my 40th birthday party, in fact) and I wanted to have good music for dancing. My wife and I briefly considered hiring a DJ, but that was just too expensive for the size of the party. Anyway, these days iPods make [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Dec 3rd, 2004
For the last two nights, about the time I would generally use for blogging, I have been transfixed for an hour or more by Keyhole, a program billed as the “Ultimate Interface to the Planet.” They may even deserve that hyperbolic tagline. It’s an incredibly entertaining product.
I am amazed at the riches offered by [...]
