·:[ Sound and Fury ]:·
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I’ve never been a big fan of sports. In fact, I’ve always been confused and more than a bit irritated that sports scores are considered news. When I was on a command center watch floor, the three channels that were shown were CNN, CNN-Headline News and ESPN. Really.

Imagine my joy at seeing the new Fantasy Congress. It’s pretty much what you think it might be. Draft legislators into your team, earn points for their performance and compete against others. Just drafting my team was an education. Some high performers you might suspect, like Sen John Warner or Sen John McCain. What intrigued me was that a disproportionate number of the high earners were women. Hmmm. I’ll let you know how it goes.

The ability to test physics by writing on a blackboard….I mean whiteboard, is just cool. And this video is at least several months old. Not sure where the technology is now.
YouTube - MIT sketching

As you know, I’m not a fan of PowerPoints, but here’s an interesting idea. Many-to-Many reports that Slideshare wants to be the YouTube of presentations.

I’m not sure about this, because so many slide decks are considered to be internal information. Perhaps in academia this makes more sense than it does to me. YouTube was initially fueled by bootlegged segments of the Daily Show and home-made Funniest Home Videos rejects. I’m not sure where the impetus for people to post and view will come from here.

You need to be invited to use the beta.

The Navy has embarked on yet another reading program. I’m a fan of these, since I’m always looking for something good to read or to listen to in the car. What I’m not a fan of is the format of the list. I’d like a list where I can login, check off the ones I’ve read, search Audible.com, mark the ones I’ve downloaded to my GPS (which BTW has an MP3 player, very nice), search my local library for others, and search Amazon for the rest. Maybe even write reviews, metatag it, search and read other reviews, and add my own recommendations for similar reading.

Is this too much to ask? Okay, I’ve found Reader2. They have some features, but not everything that I really want.

I’m convinced that companies don’t know how to slowly ship anything anymore. Tuesday I ordered some new toys (webcam and GPS). Figuring that the playing could wait and know that we didn’t have any trips in our near future, I opted for the “budget” shipping. 7-10 days, they promised. My webcam arrived yesterday and my GPS is on track to be delivered today. That’s 2-3 days for those keeping score - one day faster than the “standard” shipping of 3-5 days.

Is warehouse space that expensive? I suspect that they have a shipping process and that it’s a pretty efficient one at that. Changing their process to accommadate those of us who aren’t in a hurry is more expensive than changing for the ones in a hurry.

NetFlix is offering a prize of one million dollars to see who can improve their recommendations system. What’s interesting about this (to me, anyway) is not the dollar amount or the problem they’re trying to solve. It’s the way they’re trying to solve it.

Logo designers have long hated the idea of a logo design contest, as they believe that such free work undermines the true value of their profession. Will code developers backlash against this type of thing as well? Or will the Open Source tradition of code development for free and for the spirit of the hunt win out?

Trolling around Wikipedia tonight, checking my watchlist, looking for vandalism on “my” pages, I notice an odd entry on the USMC page. Someone added an external link to The Marine Corps’ My Space. No, really, a USMC MySpace. Yes, and the Corps, in spite being out of the typical age bracket at 230 years old, has over 27,000 friends.

It’s nicely done. A bit understated compared to the sites of some of their “friends”. They have disabled the comments feature, which, given the the FOAF comments, I can hardly blame them.

Reminds me of a story of the Marine Recruiting’s dragon commerical. You remember the one that looks like a video game and then turns into a Marine? When they showed it to the Commandant, he said, “I don’t get it.” And they told him that they weren’t trying to recruit men his age.

While traveling in Phoenix this week, I’ve noticed that outdoor malls have included music in the landscaping. The same with the botanical garden at my hotel. Are we that incapable of going from our cars to the store without being inundated with atmosphere? Personally, I like silence. I think we need more time by ourselves and our thoughts, without distraction.

Also, I stopped by Ultimate Electronics to buy a battery for my pedometer. After finding the right one, the sales assistant asked if I wanted a bottle of water. I was stunned as he went and got one for me. Don’t most stores charge $1.25 for aqua? Is this a desert thing? Still wondering about this.

Not much strikes me as truly innovative, but how about using water to write. Over at Pink Tentacle, they’ve noted how some are using waves to write. The current practical uses seem limited to amusement parks and hotels. Shades of The Abyss anyone?

As this article notes, the Marines are back in Beirut. For those who may not remember, it was 23 years ago, following some deadly terrorist attacks, that the Marine Corps pulled out of Beirut. Now, they’re back, evacuating US citizens. No matter how much I travel, no matter how much I love living abroad, I will always retain my American citizenship, because — when the bombs are dropping — I want United States Marines coming to get me.

Of course, they wouldn’t have to look far. I would be on the doorstep of the embassy, single bag in hand and ready to abandon that.

Where I am today. Relatively interesting workshop on wikis for collaboration.
ColabWiki3A20Expedition20Workshop

..playing with this game.

Falling Sand Game - hosted by Chirag Mehta @ chir.ag

Some of the best information I’ve found about Web 2.0 is coming from an 8th grade classroom.

Vicki Davis, my new favorite teacher, set up a wikispace for her students. She gave them some guidelines and let them those. The result is both a great example of Web 2.0 and a great resource for it.

These students are going to be our employees in less than 10 years. They’re going to come to us with the experience — and the expectation — of working collaboratively online.

I hope we’re ready for them.

How is calendaring search? I mean, if Google’s core competency is Search, why are they now providing a calendar? Don’t get me wrong. I’m generally a fan of Google. Not sure why I want them to hold my calendar, in addition to my files, photos, email, web site, shopping, etc.

Aggregation of information can be a dangerous thing. Right now, I don’t seem to benefit from it. I don’t see a way to easily add events from my Gmail to my Gcalendar or link a video from the Gvideo into my Gcalendar. If I’m going to put all of my data in one place, I would like to get some benefit from the aggregation rather than just worry about the next subpoena.

All right. I’m late to the YouTube game. Back in December I speculated that someone might do this. The YouTube bunch already were. It’s the flickr of videos.

Currently, however, the rating system seems to be off. The most viewed videos are trite pranks or videos of teenage girls. The highest rated videos are clips from Hollywood movies. I don’t mind seeing some of the fodder, but the “most viewed” system only highlights the worst of the offerings. They claim to be CLEAN and REAL, but many tags belie that notion.

Or maybe I’m simply not the target audience for this. The technology behind it is promising; they need to clean up the interface and junk before they can consider being bought.

It was bound to happen.

Wikipedia has become the establishment. Like Google, Wikipedia started small — the bastion of geeks. Now, everyone uses it. College students reference it. Bloggers link to it to define terms. With 1000s of edits a day and over a million English-language pages, Alexa consistently ranks Wikipedia in the top 20 visited sites.

But the real harbinger of establishment-ness has only just emerged. The Uncyclopedia is seriously devoted to fun. Based on the same software as its target, the un’pedia claims to be content-free. Jokes, rumors, baseless theories all find a home here.

They also seem to be testing out some of the new features that the ‘pedia wants to implement, such as verification. Good luck to them. As hard as it is to see someone spoofing the venerable Wikipedia, it was bound to happen.

When the idea that people can’t collaborate if they haven’t ever seen each other is discussed seriously rather than met with laughter, then we have a problem.

The United States military makes a great deal about Network Centricity - the ability to fight and win with a networked force. A young Air Force Major, Dan Ward, describes his recent experience at a Net Centric workshop. Apparently, at 30, he’s already too old. He describes the Generation Net, the current crop of recruits, the bloggers, IMers, MySpacers, who have many friends they never seen in person. This generation built Wikipedia without ever knowing what their fellow builders look like or even if they are male or female.

His point is a valid one. Netcentricity requires not just intelligence or a comfort-level with technology. It requires an visceral understanding of how to discover people and build relationships online.

Simply building and deploying a social software system isn’t enough to guarentee success. Despite what Kevin Costner has been told, in reality, If you build it, they may not come. Ross Mayfield, of Social Text, and Suw Charman have proposed a reasonable strategy for software adoption over at Many-to-Many.

Both bottom-up and top-down approaches are described. My experience has been that without leadership support a system is doomed. Mainly because the leadership controls the funding and will only fund what they know to be valuable.

We’ve noticed this before, but now people seem to be actually using Amazon’s ProductWiki. Seeing how people can already comment in the Reviews section, one wonders how this will be used or abused. They suggest that their readers/writers should “Think of a Wiki as an encyclopedia entry that everyone who comes to the page will read.” Obviously, they’ve heavily influenced by Wikipedia, but who isn’t. A wiki is a way for a community to create content. It needn’t be encyclopedic, but perhaps the ‘pedia’s influence on wikis has contorted their flexibility.

So far, their 2200-some entries are unremarkable, with some link spam and pet projects. The wiki lacks social construct, such as being able to see who edited what. Maintenance pages, like recent changes, are also missing, although “recently edited” is available. The distinction, while subtle, is important. I can see what was edited, but not how. Therefore, I can’t police the wiki for Amazon. Let’s see how long this lasts.

You’ve all seen an intelligent agent like the Wiki Choice Wizard. The wizard walks through the feature list then spits out the list of Wiki software packages that meets your specifications.

Some things I’d change. Most of the distinguishing features are technical; programming language, database or files. Most end users don’t care. Only the page history and WYSIWYG features are ones that are functionally important to the typical end user. Rather than discern based on the type of license available, why not discuss what process the wiki is designed to support. Will the wiki be used for project management or as a content management system (CMS)?

The comparison matrix has some nice features, including the ability to flag features and show only those.

Why don’t I get paid to develop something like this?