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A conversation with Gabriel Dance and Shan Carter about interactive graphics at the New York Times
May 17 2008
Last November the New York Times ran an interactive visualization of one of the Republican debates that absolutely wowed me. On this week’s Interviews with Innovators show I spoke with two of its creators, Gabriel Dance and Shan Carter, about that project, and about some of their other work including… read moreWhere is WinFS now? Quentin Clark explains.
May 15 2008
In 2004 I interviewed Quentin Clark, who led the WinFS effort, for an InfoWorld cover story on Longhorn. We had dinner recently, and Quentin made a surprising remark. He said that although WinFS never shipped, many of the underlying technologies already have. I wanted to hear more. So, on this… read moreComputational thinkers make good body hackers
May 14 2008
Sean McGrath’s report on coping with RSI reminded me of a couple of things. First, I need to find out whether the chair-mounted split keyboard shown here is still available. It’s been hugely helpful to me over the years, but I’m not sure it can be replaced at this point,… read moreA conversation with Lucas Gonze about discovering, sharing, and experiencing music
May 13 2008
It was a great pleasure to speak with Lucas Gonze for this week’s Innovators interview. Back in 2004, in Blogs + playlists = collaborative listening, I first wrote about webjay.org, the playlist-sharing service that Lucas founded and later sold to Yahoo. Later that year, I made an audio documentary about… read moreThat word, syndication, I do not think it means what you think it means
May 08 2008
Something about the title of this week’s Perspectives interview, OpenSearch federation with Search Server 2008, has been nagging me ever since I wrote it. In the interview, Richard Riley and Keller Smith describe how the new Microsoft search server can extend its reach by sending queries to other search services… read moreCalendar software is natural for reading, but not for writing
May 05 2008
In response to a popular recent item — “We posted weekly.pdf to the website. Isn’t that good enough?” — Sarah Allen echoes my favorite Sergey Brin quote. Sergey said: “I’d rather make progress by having computers understand what humans write, than by forcing humans to read moreA conversation with Janis Dickinson about citizen science
May 05 2008
On this week’s Interviews with Innovators I spoke with Janis Dickinson, director of citizen science at the Cornell Ornithology Lab. We talked about several of the lab’s projects that involve collection and analysis of volunteer observations about birds and bird habitats. Courtesy of t read moreStonewall Farm, Darby Brook Farm, and the collaborative curation of data
May 02 2008
Lately I’m obsessed with figuring out how to harness the cognitive surplus and put it to work doing better social information management. The other night I attended a kick-off meeting for a group interested in advancing the cause of local food production in our region. Inevitably the discussion turned to… read moreMarch 25 2008
To prepare for an interview with Tim Spalding, the founder and lead developer of LibraryThing, I re-registered with LibraryThing, spent some quality time with the service, and was wildly impressed. At one point in the interview, Tim asked me how I, Mr. LibraryLookup, as likely a person as there is… read moreA conversation with Carl Malamud about access to public information
March 24 2008
This week’s ITConversations show is a chat with Carl Malamud, whose exploits I’ve followd ever since he launched podcasting a decade ahead of schedule with a project called Internet Talk Radio. Since then, Carl’s mainly known for his tireless crusade to release troves of public information to the Net: SEC… read morePerspectives: Understanding CardSpace with Vittorio Bertocci
March 21 2008
The second installment of Perspectives is up, with Vittorio Bertocci1, author of Understanding Windows CardSpace This interview was recorded a few months ago, and has been waiting for the Perspectives site to launch. In January I excerpted the part about omnidirectional identity, a difficult phra read moreA close call: photos lost, then found
March 20 2008
While reviewing a white paper by a colleague on the subject of personal digital archives, I realized that I hadn’t followed through on a plan to consolidate a few different caches of digital photos from various digicam and computer eras. So of course, when I went looking, things weren’t exactly… read moreWhen the LazyWeb gets too lazy
March 18 2008
I’m running a couple of services that make automatic use of Amazon wishlists, and today I noticed that the current version of the API is going away: 503 - Service Unavailable ECS3 is currently unavailable due to a planned outage in preparation for the complete shutdown of ECS3 on March 31,… read moreA conversation with Ward Cunningham about visible workings and aboutus.org
March 18 2008
This week on ITConversations I have a two-part interview with Ward Cunningham. In part one, we explore his visible workings technique, which combines software testing with business process transparency. This is one of those transformative ideas that will not, at first, seem interesting and important to most people. And maybe… read moreMarch 14 2008
I wasn’t going to post this humorous anecdote but Mike Caulfield reminded me that it’s too funny not to share. After musing about a subscription service for running shoes, I walked in my local store, bought a new pair, and invited them to notify me in three months. Hilarity ensued.… read more
