Case in point, i’m biking home late at night and find a 4 block perimeter around BAM surrounded by cops. Is there some kind of self indulgent awards show going on or did something awful happen that I should know about? The cops aren’t going to tell me, they’re all self important and coy. I ask Twitter by getting tweets referencing BAM within a 1 mile reference and immediately find out it’s the former. Tracy Morgan is hosting the hip hop honors. I move on.

Tonight, I hear explosions outside. We look out the window, fireworks in New York in the fall. What’s up? Again, I ask Twitter and find out the Manhattan bridge is 100 years old. Now I know why the fireworks are going off + I know a cool fact.

Before, what would I have done? Well I might have typed my keywords into Google news, but there’s lag there and a crazy amount of duplicate content from people cutting and pasting the AP news wire. Google news worked ok for big news stories but not much else. Or more recently I would have tried Google’s blog search, counting on reporters on the ground, but that was always tenuous at best. I’d rarely get the answer I was looking for and i’m a little unclear about Google’s indexing lag.

With Twitter I find out instantaneously what is going on. With so many people using Twitter my question is part of the minutia of someone else’s life. This is why Twitter works as a news source. When people ask ‘why would I care what some stranger had for breakfast?’ the reason one should care is aggregated and indexed, some stranger’s breakfast is some other stranger’s news source.

So here’s my new Firefox toolbar with Twitter search. From now on when I want to know what’s up, it’s up there in the right hand corner.

I’ve also wanted to use Twitter not only to find out ‘what was that explosion?’ but to also find out ‘what is the thing to do today?’ I don’t feel like those kinds of more open questions are as easy to answer, yet. There’s just too much noise and no clean way to segment the data to my preferences. Apps like foursquare are trying with their tips feature and that’s the right direction but there needs to be more there. Right now that kind of manual mining is too much overhead with very little reward. I’m sure it’s coming. For now i’m really excited about getting my news from Twitter. Out of all the social media noise, this is something that I find actually useful.

I started out just putting a deck of slides together, keeping it to 20 and cramming as much information as I could in each slide. I did a run through and if a slide took too long, i’d shorten the amount of information on it until it took about the right amount of time. It was still a little frantic but I managed to say everything I wanted to say so I was happy.

Then yesterday, @faludi came by and I did a run through with an audience. From his feedback and suggestions I came to realize that although I was getting all the words I wanted into my deck, I was actually presenting a number of super complicated concepts without the time to provide them with the right context. So although I was finishing in time, I wasn’t being very effective and I was going to make people’s brains hurt.

There isn’t enough time with Pecha Kucha to tell a complicated story. We’re used to a slide having a lot of bullet points, but in fact with Pecha Kucha each slide should have one single, simple idea. The idea can be presented in a timed reveal to help you with pacing.

My new technique is to tell a very simply story with 10 slides instead of 20. Knowing myself and my tendency to cram as much as I can into a slide even when I consciously try not to, making only 10 slides gives me the wiggle room to expand upon each slide with 10 extra slides. Instead of feeling constrained by the format I found the 20 slide format liberating. I can concentrate on telling a simple story really well because there’s no room to do anything else. The power of limitations.

I’ve been going to the the various Web 2.0 Expo events happening around New York City this week (the Expo, Ignite, etc.) and yesterday I went to check out Fred Wilson’s keynote about the history and growth of New York’s web industry. Who should be his first slide but Red from 1979, launching ITP! Go Red!

Flowers Tamagotchi

The system is made up of several components that are either placed in the soil or on the leaves of the sensitive flowers. During this period it is important to tell the Botanicalls System which flowers it will be caring for. With the help of computer sensors that measure ground and air moisture and compare those values with expected values. All this information is sent to a single computer processor. If the computer decides that the flowers needs some attention, it will call on the designated phone number of the flowers’ owner. If the owner does not answer the phone, the flowers’ computer sends an SMS message and an email message to the owner.

Over time these communications will become more insistent and it will become impossible to overlook the flowers. After the flowers’ owners finally waters the flowers, he will receive a thank you call from the flowers. Watering flowers becomes a game similar to the Tamagotchi. The Botanicalls system will soon be available not just for one flower but for a whole winter garden or green house. Furthermore the system can be used on small farms to control soil temperatures in greenhouses. The price of the product and when it will come to market has not been announced.

Our spring show project, Distributed Surveillance Company, got a mention on NewTeeVee. We’re going to refine it and see if we can get it into a couple of festivals, I feel like it really has some legs. After all (according to Clay), Mark Cuban did suggest that we use public webcams to monitor nuclear reactors. Nothing like feeding off the irrational vigilantism that has permeated our paranoid culture willing to give up its rights for the illusion of safety. How about this for a tag line:”The distributed surveillance company. Think of it as SETI for your safety!”

Ah memories. Click above for a video of me talking about some of my projects from the Winter 06 ITP show. Painting with perspective, WayMarkr, etc. It’ll always remind me of how special ITP is.  To see projects from other ITP students, click here.

A two day seminar on Mupe (pronounced Mup-e), an open source project from Nokia with the goal of circumvent all the present day headaches of mobile device development. If you have done any mobile development you know what i’m talking about: certificate and security issues, phone incompatibility, discrepancies between the emulator and the actual phone, specific phone resources issues, etc. The stuff that keeps you from doing the fun stuff, making your application and sharing it with as many people as possible. The promise of Mupe is that there is that there will be only one client that you install once and the Nokia signs and makes sure runs on several phone models (well probably only Nokia phone models). Then you code on the server and via your mobile device subscribe to application services that transfer the application logic and resources to the phone. The apps run in the Mupe sandbox. When you want to update the app, just update the server.

We got to play with it two days. It’s still very rough around the edges but has a lot of promise. I wanted to use it for thesis but that’s unlikely unless I have constant contact with the developers at Nokia. There are still nightly client/server builds. In summary, it’s defiantly a project to watch. It needs more documentation and a much larger user base to work out the bugs.

The seminar was run by Riku Suomel, a very knowledgeable and patient (very patient) member of the Nokia project team.

I’m going to try to document this in real time, we’ll see how this goes. The funniest thing so far is that the screen-server on the overhead projector (for the talk by Richard “emacs” Stallman) is a Windows XP logo. The hall isn’t as full as it was when Jimmy Wales spoke. Clearly he’s more of a rock star but we owe a lot to Stallman.

A lot of my friends used to type for him when we were in high school. He had pretty bad CTS then and needed to hire other people to do his typing.

Talk Starting:

Richard Stallman needs a Pepsi.

“The most important consideration for choosing software is ‘does it respect your freedom’. What does that mean? There are four essential freedoms. Freedom Zero (hah!) is to run the software as you wish.”

“Software should allow you to be upright members of a community in which you cooperate. The social dimensions of software becomes ethical. Not what the software is, but the social surrounding circumstances that are imposed on the user.”

“The developer of proprietary software is attacking the fabric of your community. Since you cannot copy software you cannot help others in your community. ”

“The most essential resource of a society is a psychosocial resource, it’s the spirit of goodwill. If you can raise the value of this resource a little bit, you can have profound implications on society. Proprietary software makers are poisioning this society.”

(on Piracy) Helping your neighbor != Attacking Ships

“How much fear is it going to take to make you not help your neighbor.”

Stallman also just said that in Germany and Argentina he has heard that people are threatened with rape for pirating software.

This is a very big picture, preachy talk. We’re supposed to be the foot soldiers and he’s the visionary. “To live in freedom, we must only use free software.”

“When a program says, I don’t want to copy this music for you, I don’t want to print this file for you, because I don’t like you.” <– Stallman’s take on DRM.

“A non free program can never be trusted. Just-trust-me software. Does a given developer deserve this kind of trust?”

“The freedom to contribute lets us built upon each other’s work and decide together where we want our software to go.”

GNU origin story. Stallman came to the conclusion that he wanted to write free software in 1983. “The word ‘gnu’ is the funniest word in the english language. It’s also very funny because the G is silent.” They tried to build a MACH micro-kernel but failed. Luckily in 1991 Linux came along. Legally, a program is a literary work and so it is covered by copyright law. The GNU GPL works around that copyright law.” The difference between the GPL and other free software licenses is ‘copy left’. The X windows systems allows you to release modified versions that aren’t free. Copy left doesn’t allow for that. Every copy of the program comes with the freedom. The GPL makes the four freedoms inalienable rights.

“Linus does not agree with the FSF tenants, he considers himself apolitical.”

“To finish I will now present my other identity.”

He then proceeds to pun on a robe and a halo.

“I am Saint Ignatius of the Church of Emacs.”

Somehow Alice and I have ended up on the course catalog page for ITP. Watch us fuel the dynamism between technology and creativity!

I went to see Jimmy Wales, of Wikipedia fame, speak today at a talk sponsored by Free Culture NYC. It was a packed house. I tried to take some ZoneTag photos but my fancy new SLVR isn’t that nice. Jimmy skipped most of his talk about Wikipedia (a majority of those attending had edited documents in Wikipedia and were fairly knowledgeable) and went ahead to talking about his new project, a search engine sponsored by the Wikia foundation. It turns out the Wikia foundation has a wealth of specialized content. Where Wikipedia only has 320 articles about the Muppets (Jim Henson, Big Bird, etc.), Wikia has over 3,000! There is general knowledge appropriate for an encyclopedia and then there’s the specific knowledge that is more appropriate for Wikia.

Wikia aims to build an open search. Built on open source tools, open source algorithms to bring trust and openness to search. Google and the rest keep their rule sets hidden away to protect against spammers but that’s just another version of security by obscurity. As Jimmy sees it, the blackhat SEOs have hundreds of thousands to spend on optimization while the little guy is dropped from the rankings. With open algorithms everyone will have a shot.

There are a lot of unanswered questions here, but it is definitely an exiting experiment. One that doesn’t protect users from themselves but treats them with trust, respect and gives them the benefit of the doubt. Wikia sees this open source search as a service for those that cannot compete with Google. Instead, third parties can syndicate the search and compete over user interface, branding and added services.

I also got a sneak peak at the OLPC!