Category: Netlife

Interesting city, Washington, DC. Lots of interesting people there. Good stuff will come out of my meetings, I hope. Next time, because I plan to go back there soon, I want to see Congress from the inside …

And Airlie House in Warrenton, Virginia wasn’t bad either.
The company was much better than the food though, but the place seemed very nice – it was indeed a working conference, but also a very well-convened and -prepared such with a great mix of people and practices. From me, a big Thank You to Lars and Carolyn and all the others at AmericaSpeaks for putting this together!!

Now, let’s see how much will happen now when people get back to their everyday-lives. This might just be the right people/time/agenda mix for something real to happen. I look forward to this.

I’ve been invited to attend the 21st Century Literacy Summit on 7-8 March 2002 in Berlin. Amazing, these guys (AOL/Bertelsmann Foundations) actually fly in people to attend their conference.

“Society in the 21st Century is undergoing rapid changes as it shifts from industrial models to a “knowledge-based society.” In order for the broadest segment of the population to take full advantage of this transition, it is critical to develop and promote a new “21st Century Literacy.” New technologies have already become an integral part of everyday life. They have also transformed many aspects of how we learn and interact, especially in Education, Workplace, Public policy.”

Today has been designated World Book and Copyright Day by UNESCO, and is celebrated around the world, e.g., here in Denmark.

So, today is a good day for opening up a refreshed version of my subsite with book recommendations. I’ve applied my GotzeGoogler thingy there, and added a few good, new books. So, go buy a book!

Although I know people like Dave Winer find it politically incorrect, Amazon’s new Web Service (for associates only) seems pretty damn cool. Strange DTD though …

No, it’s not a new cleansing agent I have made. It’s the result of my experiments with SOAP::Lite and a bit (13 lines!) of Perl. What am I talking about? Modern internet technology! Web Services, SOAP, XML, WSDL and the Google API, of course! Check it out!

Having Google results served up on-the-fly, on-your-site, has been possible for a while if you used illegitimate scraping or roboting. Now it can be done legitimately using modern internet technologies, Web Services.

But, beware of what seems to be a conspiracy. Hmmm. Is a Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory (RAND) conspiracy possible?

Web service develpment is not so much a technological challange (I could do it), but one of open standards.

“The Rise and Fall of DDS – evaluating the ambitions of Amsterdam’s Digital City“, Reinder Rustema writes that DDS might not have been open enough because of its institutionalisation and the closed design of the interface which did not allow improvement by the users. It intended to become a broadcaster and mass communicator more than becoming a community. This eventually made the users passive paying consumers of a telecommunication service. In spite of efforts to ‘design’ an on-line community, the major achievement of DDS has been more that it contributed computing power, disk space and connectivity to the internet for public use, much like the academic and research institutes have done in the early years of the internet.”

NIC2001 – Nordic Interactive Conference 2001 Enhance your Digital Vision – and check out User Reality at the Nordic Interactive Conference, 31 Oct. – 3 Nov, 2001 in Copenhagen.
Hmmm.

Hypergene’s Amazoning the news: “What if we told stories on the web the way Amazon sells books? Storytelling on the web demands its own vocabulary and strategies – indeed a whole new way of thinking. The web site that does the best job of telling stories in a web-appropriate way is also the most successful: Amazon.” Hmmm … interesting idea.

Software for Information Architects: “It’s rather ironic that one of the toughest challenges in understanding software for information architects involves trying to define meaningful categories for the darned stuff.”

Brent Schlender: “You don’t have to be a poet or a historian to recognize that we’re living through something that has happened only a few times in the past 10,000 years. Call it a metaphor shift. Once, metals defined profound transformations in human society–the Iron Age, the Bronze Age. More recently we’ve marked time by the emergence of new technologies–the Industrial Revolution, the Information Age. But this time the metaphor is neither a pure technology nor a physical object, though it embraces both. It is an idea. Welcome to the Age of the Network.”

e-2 “As word processing software becomes ever more advanced, with the ability to correct syntax and spelling errors, these familiar programmes begin to impose a standardised corporate language onto our writing – subtly altering its meaning. Working with the programmer Jon Pollard, Takahashi has produced a new and fully functioning online version of these platforms which undermines this dehumanising process. Reclaiming the initiative back from the software, Word Perhect presents an idiosyncratic hand drawn interface leading to a set of functioning but strangely altered tools.”