It's been a month since I've posted anything here. I have no excuse except, you know, I haven't posted anything. I have been doing a lot of posting over on our TechNews site, talking about Office 2007 and Windows Vista and I'm planning to do another series specifically on Vista as well as posting on internal technical issues as they arise.

But I mean to post here again too. Maybe even later today....

Christine Kane relates 17 things about creativity, including:

--Creativity is about paying attention
--The only way to learn about creativity is to create things
--Everyone has valid fears, excuses, resentments and blocks (Creativity teaches you to say 'so-what?')
-- When you’re creating something, you really GET that all of the things that are supposed to matter so much don’t matter much at all.
--Creativity is about showing up, not perfection

Soon, you may be able to download audio books to your phone:

Audio books are set to be revolutionised by a tiny card that can store up to five lengthy novels on a phone.

The card can be slotted into a mobile phone, dispensing with the need to carry up to six CDs for an audio version of a book. The technology, originally developed to store music, will be released this year by Nokia.

The Guardian provides a list of 100 useful websites

Inveneo, which brings wireless networking to rural villages, is looking for people willing to donate old thumb drives they're no longer using.

New research from Akamai and JupiterResearch indicates that the average online shopper waits about 4 seconds for a webpage to load before abandoning the site. Also:

Based on the feedback of 1,058 online shoppers that were surveyed during the first half of 2006, JupiterResearch offers the following analysis:

--The consequences for an online retailer whose site underperforms include diminished goodwill, negative brand perception, and, most important, significant loss in overall sales.
--Online shopper loyalty is contingent upon quick page loading, especially for high-spending shoppers and those with greater tenure.
--JupiterResearch recommends that retailers make every effort to keep page rendering to no longer than four seconds.

Additional findings in the report show that more than one-third of shoppers with a poor experience abandoned the site entirely, while 75 percent were likely not to shop on that site again. These results demonstrate that a poorly performing website can be damaging to a company’s reputation; according to the survey, nearly 30 percent of dissatisfied customers will either develop a negative perception of the company or tell their friends and family about the experience.

According to Time, it's YouTube

You will be unsurprised to know that PayPal and eBay are the top two places that phishers falsely claim to be representing.

Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Citibank are also in the top ten.

Some tips for starting an 'activity-centric' wiki:

1. Pick a project or activity you are involved with or leading - ideally, one that is current and has several emails going back and forth amongst the team members (and others, if appropriate).
2. Collect all the relevant emails you can get your hands on including the document attachments.
3. Based on the emails, the project objectives, etc, draft an outline of the project as if you had to give a presentation to someone as to the project purpose, history, status, next steps, current activities, issues, ....
4. That outline is your wiki HomePage (or FrontPage or MainPage or whatever depending on the wiki engine you're using). Copy it into your workspace Page. (Optionally, take a key phrase from each line of the outline and make it a page link.)
5. Now - copy the content of each email somewhere into that outline OR Pages you are linking to from the HomePage.
6. Don't start editing yet. You want it to look familiar to your audience. If anything, you may want to preface some of the email content with the person's name who sent it ('Jane wants to know >', Carl commented >', 'Here's my suggestion >', .....)
7. Before you invite the audience in, take a step back and ask yourself "If I was looking at this for the first time and someone was expecting me to understand it or contribute something, would I get it?" Probably not, so start tweaking it a little and add some introductory comments on the HomePage

...

Here are the top 10 most common passwords (though it's a bit UK-centric):

10. Thomas (person's name--always popular, so easy to crack)
9. arsenal (football--soccer--team, the UK-centric part)
8. monkey (almost my favorite)
7. charlie (oh, look, another person's name)
6. qwerty (and we all know where that one comes from)
5. 123456 (*totally* my favorite)
4. letmein (you know, 'let me in')
3. liverpool (another football team--apparently they're a very popular one)
2. password (yeah, this just screams--I forgot my password and the admins had to reset it for me)
1. 123 (which beats out '123456' but you know when all the '123' people are forced to go to 6 character minimum passwords they're going to use '123456')

If you are using any of these passwords or anyone's first name, or anything that resembles these passwords--wow--change now because these have all been Dugg.

From Ionut Chitu:

1. If you want to know if a person is a man or a woman and the name doesn't help, do a search for the name.

...

3. A better search for Flickr. Google uses information from other sites that link to Flickr photos, so you may find Google search better.

...

7. Type the name of a painter and you can take an art class.

...

9. Find the color of a word. "Word Color is a windows program that uses Google Image Search to determine the color of a word or string of words. It goes out there, retrieves the top 9 images and loops through all pixels, calculating the average hue, which is later converted to a color."

eBay uses 2 petabytes of storage daily and adds 10 terabytes of additional storage every week.

Think about this:

• The Library of Congress is 20 terabytes of text
• 50,000 trees worth of pages is 1 terabyte
• All the US academic research libraries is 2 petabytes

All the information in the world? I'm not entirely sure, but I have to say that this article is actually more fascinating than the one that prompted this post in the first place.

• Did you know that North American's use 11,916 sheets of paper a year (Europeans only use 7,280)?
• Also, the entire World Wide Web comprised 167 terabytes of information in 2003 (probably a bit more now, just from eBay)
• Voice telephone traffic accounts for the largest information flow in the world by a large margin over the Internet, television, and radio.

Wikipedia has refused to censor themselves in China, however, it appears that the Chinese government has unblocked Wikipedia:

"We'll see how long this lasts," said the company on its site. "Chinese Wikipedians have expressed fears about the detrimental effects that a permanent ban would have. First of all, the block deprives a useful resource from the majority of Chinese speakers in the world. Moreover, since Mainland Chinese form a significant portion of the Chinese Wikipedia community (46% of all users in March 2005), a long-term block could severely stunt the growth of Wikipedia similar to the block in June 2004."

The Chinese government still can and indeed appears to be, blocking certain articles within Wikipedia, but Wikipedia itself has consistently refused to take censor Wikipedia themselves. It should be noted that both Google and Yahoo have acceded to Chinese government demands that they filter their searches for the Chinese market.

In case you were interested:

In 1888, Thomas W. Holley, a 24-year-old paper mill worker in Holyoke, had an idea for how to use the paper scraps, known as sortings, discarded by the mill. Sortings were anything trimmed away as scrap or considered of lesser quality than the writing paper eventually packaged and sold. Holley's notion was to bind the scraps into pads that could be sold at a cut rate. Convinced he had a winning idea, he founded his own company to collect the sortings from local mills (Holyoke was then the papermaking capital of the world) and began churning out bargain-price pads.

The legal pad's margins, also called down lines, are drawn 1.25 inches from the left edge of the page. (This is the only requirement for a pad to qualify as a legal pad, though the iconic version has yellow paper, blue lines, and a red gummed top.) Holley added the ruling that defined the legal pad in the early 1900s at the request of a local judge who was looking for space to comment on his own notes.

That, at least, is the story AMPAD tells. Holley never filed a patent for his invention; no other company in the legal pad market has ever come forward with a competing claim. Like many origin myths, AMPAD's answers some essential questions but leaves others unresolved. It doesn't, for instance, explain the emergence of yellow as the standard legal pad color. Holley is thought to have created white pads, not yellow ones. Yellow paper is about 10 to 20 percent more expensive than white paper, due to the cost of dye and the additional cleanup the dyeing process necessitates, an extravagance the thrifty Holley would likely have dismissed.

...via BoingBoing

No one writes paper and envelope letters anymore, but everyone shops online. Although the number of first class mailings has dropped significantly for the US Postal Service over the last few years, the number of packages they delivered has managed to pick up a lot of slack:

At a recent conference that attracted 15,000 eBay enthusiasts to Las Vegas, the main sponsor was a big advocate of online shopping: the U.S. Postal Service.

"I have one message today for the entire eBay community," Postmaster General John Potter said in a speech. "We love every buyer, every seller, every power seller. Thank you for shipping with the United States Postal Service."

As people send e-mail and e-cards instead of handwritten letters and greetings, as they pay more of their bills online and file their tax returns electronically, the Postal Service has started to seem outdated.

Yet the Internet is actually injecting new life, and sorely needed revenue, into the Postal Service. And it is happening with packages, millions of them shipped every day, in a journey that starts with a few mouse clicks and ends days later at a customer's door.

...via Smart Mobs

Well, not putting blog entries up, that's for sure.

We recently provided the IT support for the first-ever National Special Olympics held in Ames, IA July 3-7.

Almost immediately after that, I bought a new house.

However, I hope that regular blogging will be returning soon (like, this week).

From Infothought:

1. Google query syntax underwent some subtle changes over the years.
Not too long ago, you couldn't enter more than 10 words into the Google search box. Or to be more precisely, you *could*, but subsequent words were ignored. I bet the Google founders were thinking "10 words ought to be enough for everyone," and mostly there were right – but for some advanced uses, especially with the Google Search API, a little more is helpful. Then, a while ago, Google increased the words limit to 32 words. This is probably OK for a few more years!

Another change is that Google ignores stop words nowadays. Stop words in search engines are words like "the" or "a" which are too tiny or common to be useful additions to most searches. However, Google is now accepting them as semi-normal words (one remaining difference being that they're not highlighted, or linked to the dictionary). This means in Google.com, you get different results when search for [the tale of a cowboy] vs [* tale * * cowboy] vs [tale cowboy]. (I'll be using square brackets around search queries – they're not to be included in the search.)

Another operator changed its functionality during the years; a couple of years ago, you could only query Google for [site:something.com], but not [site:something.com/something/]. Today, you can add folders to the site operator.

Here:

There are seventy four books on the desk about evolutionary theory. A laptop is open on the desk.

> look laptop

There seems to be a dissertation chapter on the laptop.

> read chapter

It is long-winded and boring. You do not want to read it.

> read chapter

It is obnoxious. You hate it.

> read book

Read. There is a book underneath it that concerns a related topic.

> read book

Read. There is a book underneath it that concerns a related topic.

> work on dissertation

You spend two hours searching the OED for the usage history of the word devolve.

> work on dissertation

You spend three hours reading five articles which have nothing to do with the dissertation.

> work on dissertation

You spend twenty minutes online reading about baseball.

> tear out hair

Taken. You find the Elvish sword.

> in my hair?

I don't understand that.

> work on dissertation

You spend five minutes playing online poker.

By special request I'm moving the Eagle cam up to the top of the page. I'm also posting the link on the left so it's easy to find.

If you haven't visited, check it out.

In BusinessWeek online, an article on how Steve Jobs makes dynamic presentations :

Practice, Practice, and Practice Some More
Jobs takes nothing for granted during product launches. He reviews and rehearses his material. According to a Business Week article on February 6, 2006, "Jobs unveils Apple's latest products as if he were a particularly hip and plugged-in friend showing off inventions in your living room. Truth is, the sense of informality comes only after grueling hours of practice." The article goes on to say that it's not unusual for Jobs to prepare for four hours as he reviews every slide and demonstration (see BW, 2/6/06, "Steve Jobs' Magic Kingdom").

Keep It Visual
Speaking of slides, there are very few bullet points in a Jobs presentation. Each slide is highly visual. If he's discussing the new chip inside a computer, a slide in the background will show a colorful image of the chip itself alongside the product. That's it. Simple and visual.

From CNN--How I Work: Bill Gates

The screen on the left has my list of e-mails. On the center screen is usually the specific e-mail I'm reading and responding to. And my browser is on the right-hand screen. This setup gives me the ability to glance and see what new has come in while I'm working on something, and to bring up a link that's related to an e-mail and look at it while the e-mail is still in front of me.

At Microsoft, e-mail is the medium of choice, more than phone calls, documents, blogs, bulletin boards, or even meetings (voicemails and faxes are actually integrated into our e-mail in-boxes).

I get about 100 e-mails a day. We apply filtering to keep it to that level—e-mail comes straight to me from anyone I've ever corresponded with, anyone from Microsoft, Intel, HP, and all the other partner companies, and anyone I know. And I always see a write-up from my assistant of any other e-mail, from companies that aren't on my permission list or individuals I don't know. That way I know what people are praising us for, what they are complaining about, and what they are asking.

...via Digg

Did you know that someone has registered DIDYOUKNOWTHATYOUCANONLYHAVESIXTY-THREECHARACTERSINADOMAIN-NAME.com?

This and other interesting facts about .COM domain names can be found here. Including:

• 538 registered domain names are 63 characters long
• The most popular length for domain names is 11 characters
• All three letter domain combinations for .COM domains are already taken
• The most common letter to start a domain name is 'S'. Q, X, Y, and Z are the least common.

...via BoingBoing

Streaming video of a Bald Eagle nest.

Basically because it's cool

From Firefox developer, Ben Goodger:

It's great when people make contributions in the form of ideas and proposals, but it's even better when they're written for busy people. Here are some examples:

Making important points up front
Clear taxonomy of headings, and lots of them
Writing clearly and succinctly
No long, unbroken paragraphs or tracts of text.
Preferring bulleted lists with clear points to paragraphs.
Use of emphasis in formatting to make important things clear

...via digg

Podcasts now outnumber radio stations. This isn't really surprising, but I do find it interesting:

There are now more podcasts than there are radio stations worldwide, matching a prediction made on an Irish blog site last year.

In November of last year on his blog Podcasting News Ireland, Brian Greene forecast that, with new podcasts growing by more than 800 per week, they would outnumber radio stations by St Patrick's Day 2006. He said that although podcasts are strictly speaking shows rather than stations, they are independently distributed and subscribed so the comparison holds true to an extent.

A study recently found that Web users basically visit the same six sites each time they're online:

The study found that half of internet-using Britons (51 per cent) visit just six or less sites on a regular basis.

Three quarters of people questioned say the internet is indispensable to their daily lives and more than nine out of ten (95 per cent) say they go online with a specific destination in mind. People are now using the internet more smartly, visiting a handful of destination websites that have emerged as 'Supersites' due to their importance to people's lives.

The research suggests that using just one banking, shopping, travel information and holiday website is enough for a person to keep their life well-managed.

...via digg

Word is that Mozilla (makers of Firefox) made $72M last year:

The best piece of information I got out of BarCampLA was that Firefox, which is produced by the for-profit Mozilla Corporation, made $72M last year and is on target to have 120 employees this year. I have no idea if this is true (anyone?), but it makes sense. I mean, there have to be 72M people using Firefox out there, and making $1 a year seems low to me! Mark Pincus brought this topic up recently.

Mozilla Corporation makes all that money because of the Google Search box on the top right. If you search with that box (which I do all day long) and you click on the Google ads on the results page Firefox gets ~80% of that. They also have Amazon in the search box, and other services that I'm sure kick them back some affiliate fees. Brilliant.

What an amazing business: make a kick-ass browser for $10-15M a year in expense and make $72M (and growing) in revenue. It's such a good business that the folks at Flock.com are trying to do a similar thing by building a wrapper with value-added services (like bookmarking tools) on top of Firefox.

...via digg

From Paul Purcell at About.com

• Record parking spot locations.
• Engine repairs. Send a pic to a mechanic who may talk you through a quick fix.
• Business or service function and hours. Copy posted business hours or listed service functions (and pricing) for later review and recall. You can also report price gouging.
• Child custodian. If you can't get to your kids at school or other function, relay a picture of the person who is coming to pick them up.
• Info on injured or hospitalized people.
• Hotel room number and location.
• ID your evac gear. Take a picture to prove ownership.
• Photo scavenger hunt. Give kids a short list of things they should take a picture of.
• Identify the close-up. Take a really close up picture of something while the kids aren't looking....

...via Smart Mobs

From a Wired News article:

According to recent research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, I've only a 50-50 chance of ascertaining the tone of any e-mail message. The study also shows that people think they've correctly interpreted the tone of e-mails they receive 90 percent of the time.

"That's how flame wars get started," says psychologist Nicholas Epley of the University of Chicago, who conducted the research with Justin Kruger of New York University. "People in our study were convinced they've accurately understood the tone of an e-mail message when in fact their odds are no better than chance," says Epley.

From eric cogan:

#1 http://www.meebo.com - A small upstart company that has brought trillian (http://www.trillian.cc) like features to the web. You can access Yahoo! Messanger, Jabber, Gtalk, AIM, ICQ and MSN directly through the web in a desktop like enviroment that supports multiple connections to different IM networks much like trillian.

#2 http://www.rememberthemilk.com - Another cool web 2.0 creation. If you are like me you tend to forget to do things. Also if you are like me you are connected to the world in some fashion no matter where you go (my cellphone has yet to leave my side in years). Remeberthemilk is excellent because it supports reminders via cellphones, email and instant messaging.

...via Digg

...then mobile phones:

About an hour into a typical show on U2's Vertigo tour, Bono tells the crowd to hold up their mobile phones, in what has become the modern-day equivalent of flicking on a lighter. Instantly, thousands of blue-tinted screens illuminate the darkness as he marvels at the spectacle.
...
Then the band launches into the song "One," and Bono encourages the audience to use their phones to send a text message (also known as an SMS) to the one.org Web site, a sort of digital petition voicing support for poverty relief in Africa. Later, during the encore, the names of all who did so are scrolled on the same screen, and each receive a message of thanks from Bono on their phones.

This is one of the most visible examples of how the mobile phone is being used as a communication tool between artist and audience, turning the concert event into a much more interactive experience.

...via Smart Mobs

Google is pilot testing free internet at Heathrow Airport:

According to Google, the average airline passenger spends over 9 hours a year waiting for flights. Half of British passengers surveyed said they typically spent this time eating, drinking or shopping, while 71 per cent of respondents said they would like to use this time to find out more information, such as maps and weather forecasts, about their destinations.

The Google Space terminals, in addition to internet access, provide additional tools such as a digital photo editor. A sample of the Google Space terminal features is available online at www.google.co.uk/googlespace.

,,,via Smart Mobs

Interesting Wired News article on outsourcing IT to rural US communities rather than over seas:

Today Rural Sourcing claims 20 clients, including Mattel and Cardinal Health, $1 million in revenue and 50 full-time employees at five IT centers in Arkansas, North Carolina and Missouri.

White started the company two years ago with $2 million of her own money in partnership with her alma mater, Arkansas State University in Jonesboro, where she earned a bachelor's degree and MBA while raising two small children. She hopes to employ 100 full-time consultants by the end of next year, and 1,000 within five to seven years.

The company charges $35 to $50 per hour for IT expertise, which may cost around $100 in New York City. While this is no match for outsourcing rates in India, clients benefit from local accents and similar time zones -- not to mention the absence of stigma sometimes attached to farming jobs out to foreign countries.

...via Slashdot

--Egyptian Pyramid locations

--Homes of the Celebrities

--Endangered Species Sightings

From the Belfast Telegraph:

A small but growing segment of today's dearly departed are preparing themselves for the afterlife with the latest electronic gadgets, with mobiles at the top of the list, according to funeral director Seamas Griffin of Kirwan's funeral homes in Dublin.

...

"I've seen it a few times. It's not a big trend but it is going on. I've seen people buried with all kinds of things, even a pager," he said.

...

"Some other people may be terrified they'll wake up in the coffin, so they take along a mobile to ring for help to get them out," he said. However, certain rules would apply, including making sure the mobile is switched off or on silent before it accompanies the deceased.

eBay's founders are donating money to start a microfinance fund at Tufts University:

EBay Inc. founder Pierre Omidyar and his wife Pamela on Friday said they gave $100 million in eBay stock to Tufts University to create a fund that will invest in international microfinance, or lending to people who are too poor to qualify for traditional loans.

...via Smart Mobs

Tracking Whale Songs

Plate Tectonics

The Highest Points in all 50 States

Dig to the Other Side (if you actually dug that hole through the center of the earth, where would you end up)

Stanford on iTunes provides university-related audio conference via iTunes. Content includes lectures, music, sports, etc. There are also plans to include a restricted area where students can get lecture notes, etc.

...via BoingBoing

So, today is the day you start that new project?

Here's a list of things Not-to-Do from 52 Projects:

• Do not decide to organize your cd rack.
• Do not freak out that you have no money.
• Do not go into the bathroom and give your Academy Award acceptance speech.
• Do not put on Prince and party like it's 1999. (Well, okay, maybe ONCE, just to get you fired up about your project.)
• Do not start going through all the papers on your desk.
• Do not make a list of all the things you have to get done at work.
• Do not go to IMDB to see who that actor was in that movie you saw the other night. Or what that girl from that show from way back when is doing now.
• Do not start perusing your own bookshelves.
• Do not organize your computer files.

Great post at 43 Folders on how to make your e-mail worthwhile and manageable for the recipients:

Before you type anything into a new message, have explicit answers for two questions:

1. Why am I writing this?
2. What exactly do I want the result of this message to be?

If you can't succinctly state these answers, you might want to hold off on sending your message until you can. People get dozens, hundreds, even thousands of emails each day, so it's only natural for them to gravitate toward the messages that are well thought-out and that clearly respect their time and attention. Careless emails do not invite careful responses.

Think through your email from the recipient's point of view, and make sure you've done everything you can to try and help yourself before contacting someone else. If it's a valuable message, treat it that way, and put in the time to making your words count.

Google is launching Google BlogSearch:

Blog Search is Google search technology focused on blogs. Google is a strong believer in the self-publishing phenomenon represented by blogging, and we hope Blog Search will help our users to explore the blogging universe more effectively, and perhaps inspire many to join the revolution themselves. Whether you're looking for Harry Potter reviews, political commentary, summer salad recipes or anything else, Blog Search enables you to find out what people are saying on any subject of your choice.

Your results include all blogs, not just those published through Blogger; our blog index is continually updated, so you'll always get the most accurate and up-to-date results; and you can search not just for blogs written in English, but in French, Italian, German, Spanish, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese and other languages as well.

...via BoingBoing

For example:

Knowledge workers prefer closed offices, but seem to communicate better in open ones. Of course there is great variation among open and closed office types, but the most extensive research in the area (from Cornell professors Frank Becker and William Sims) suggests that while most knowledge workers prefer closed offices because they are better able to concentrate, they communicate informally and build trust and social capital more easily in more open office environments (even high-walled cubicles, they say, restrict interpersonal communications). They note: "Our research, done with employees in job functions ranging from software development to marketing and business development, indicates that the more open the 'open' plan office environment, the more conducive it is to overall work effectiveness, when communication and interaction are critical elements of the work process."2 Becker and Sims are undeniably experts on this topic, but I feel that, like many corporate executives, they downplay the need for concentration and quiet when knowledge work is done in office environments.

...via elearningpost

...for 4.1 billion dollars

...via BoingBoing

eBay began as Auction Web ten years ago and was renamed eBay in 1997. Some key milestones:

• Auction Web starts charging users a percentage of the sale fee in February 1996, becoming a real business for the first time. The feedback system, allowing buyers and sellers to rate each other, is introduced
• Monthly revenues reach $10,000 in June 1996, prompting Mr Omidyar to leave his job and run the site full-time
• In 1997, the newly-renamed eBay marks its 1,000,000th sale - a Big Bird toy, based on the Sesame Street TV character
• Meg Whitman joins as chief executive in 1998. Later that year, the company goes public - more than one million people are registered users and 8% of the items on sale are Beanie Babies
• eBay sets up local sites in the UK and Germany in 1999 and overcomes a serious crash that closes the site for 22 hours
• Surviving the dotcom bust, it overtakes Amazon as most visited e-commerce site in 2001 and buys the Paypal online payment service in 2002 - but suffers a setback in Japan, withdrawing from the market after losing out to Yahoo!

Get Real reports that the current rumor is that Technorati will be sold to a 'large search company' in the next week or so.

Uji in Japan is pilot testing RFID tags with information for touristsi:

According to Kyoto Shimbun, the city of Uji in Kyoto prefecture and the city of Hikone in Shiga prefecture will test RFID-based information services for sightseers. RFID tags will be embedded in the environment and sightseers will use mobile phones and PDAs with integrated RFID readers. Delivered to these devices is information about nearby sightseeing spots and stores. Hitachi and KDDI will join this project.

...via Smart Mobs

According to ElectricNews.net, teenagers are starting to spend more of their money on technology and less on clothes:

Mobile phones, MP3 players and hand-held computer devices continue to threaten the traditional hold of the clothing industry on spending in the youth market. Younger consumers are seen as the largest growth segment for the wireless industry based on data supplied by Simmons Market Research Bureau.

Older teenagers are driving an exponential increase in text messaging volumes and Packaged Facts estimates the youth market has a spending power of USD485 billion. "Marketers should note that women in the 15 to 24 age group are more likely to use a computer and more likely to own a mobile phone and use it for text messaging," Don Montuori, Packaged Facts acquisitions editor said.

...via Smart Mobs

Via Shiny Shiny: these dogs will start shaking their heads and singing a few seconds before the phone actually rings. I guess the actual ringing doesn't give you enough prep time before you answer.

Interesting National Geographic article on the things that make Lance Armstrong the winner that he is:

Early in his career Armstrong showed only average muscle efficiency—the percentage of chemical energy that the muscles are able to harness to produce power. Higher muscle efficiency means greater production of power.

From 1992 to 1999, the year of his first Tour de France win, Armstrong was able to increase his muscle efficiency by 8 percent through hard and dedicated training. Coyle says Armstrong is the only human who has been shown to change his muscle efficiency.

News.com has a good article on the interruption environment technology helps us create:

The typical office worker is interrupted every three minutes by a phone call, e-mail, instant message or other distraction. The problem is that it takes about eight uninterrupted minutes for our brains to get into a really creative state.

The result, says Carl Honore, journalist and author of "In Praise of Slowness," is a situation where the digital communications that were supposed to make working lives run more smoothly are actually preventing people from getting critical tasks accomplished.

Also:

The problem appears to be getting worse. A study by Hewlett-Packard earlier this year found that 62 percent of British adults are addicted to their e-mail--checking messages during meetings, after working hours and on vacation. Half of workers felt a need to respond to e-mails immediately or within an hour, and one in five people reported being "happy" to interrupt a business or social gathering to respond to an e-mail or phone message.

...via Smart Mobs

A Fast Company article on Cirque du Soleil and innovation:

It's this willingness to take creative risk that is Cirque's original genius and the key to its competitive success, says Renee Mauborgne, coauthor of Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant (Harvard Business School Press, 2005) and professor of strategy and management at INSEAD. Cirque combined the thrill of the circus with the high production values and intellectual sophistication of the theater or ballet to create a new art form and, along with it, a new "blue ocean" market. The company's future, she says, will depend on its ability to sustain that culture of risk taking, particularly as competitors enter the market. "The danger is that when you begin to be imitated, you start entering into red-ocean competition, where your focus is on outcompeting rivals rather than on creating the next blue ocean," says Mauborgne. "Then the competition, and not the marketplace, sets your agenda

...via elearningpost

Great article at T.H.E. Journal Online on the skills that every educator should have today:

1. Word Processing Skills
2. Spreadsheets Skills
3. Database Skills
4. Electronic Presentation Skills
5. Web Navigation Skills
6. Web Site Design Skills
7. E-Mail Management Skills
8. Digital Cameras
9. Computer Network Knowledge Applicable to your School System
10. File Management & Windows Explorer Skills
11. Downloading Software From the Web (Knowledge including eBooks)
12. Installing Computer Software onto a Computer System
13. WebCT or Blackboard Teaching Skills
14. Videoconferencing skills
15. Computer-Related Storage Devices (Knowledge: disks, CDs, USB drives, zip disks, DVDs, etc.)
16. Scanner Knowledge
17. Knowledge of PDAs
18. Deep Web Knowledge
19. Educational Copyright Knowledge
20. Computer Security Knowledge

    ...via The Shifted Librarian

Google Maps Mania reports on how people are using Google Maps' API.

You can:

Find the landmark
Check out injuries from running with the bulls
Recent worldwide earthquakes
...and many more

...via BoingBoing

According to this article, Seattle and San Francisco are the top cities for wireless web access in the US currently.

...via Smart Mobs

Via Smart Mobs--United Airlines will be offering wi-fi on flights:

UNITED Airlines has become the first US carrier to get regulatory approval to offer wireless Internet, or Wi-Fi access, on its airborne domestic flights in the US.

United said the Federal Aviation Administration granted approval for the service to be offered by Verizon Airfone for passenger and crew use of wireless technology.
United and Verizon said that approval was granted after the two companies successfully demonstrated that the usage of the wireless technology known as 802.11 within the cabin does not affect the aircraft's operation.

National Geographic has footage from inside a tornado.

...via BoingBoing

Nichole, Floyd and I--along with Ray Kimsey and Kevin Gamble--gave our talk this morning on Sharing Content Through Syndication. Our talk had been moved several times and attendance was a little disppointing (I think we had six people, including Brian and Beth Raney, who left another session early to be our session host).

We talked about the aggregation system that we developed (Nichole did much of the programming; Ray and Nichole worked on the web services part).

If you want to see the slides, they're here. You may also want to check out the site itself.

And I have now seen the Alamo...

Elaine has blogged the keynote speaker this morning so, you know, I don't have to...

I also went to talks on eXtension, our CMS development process (good talk!), and talked to Blair Fannin about podcasting in Texas.

I have walked most of the Riverwalk, but have not seen the Alamo yet.

I got to San Antonio last night about 9. The ACE/NETC conference is at the Marriott Rivercenter right next to the San Antonio River Walk. I had good flight connections and a trouble free flight (go here to read the adventures of those who traveled by bus.

Today I attended an all day meeting for the eXtension IT Advisory Committee. We discussed history of, future plans, infrastructure and next steps. Earth-shattering decisions were saved for a later meeting. There's a lot of potential for technology and collaboration--I'm looking forward to what we can do with it.

I haven't seen much of San Antonio yet though I did go on the boat ride on the river. It's cold (very, very cold) in the hotel and hot and humid outside. Talks start tomorrow so I'll try to catch up with those, post the slides for our talk on synidcation on Thursday and other updates on the conference (no pictures though unless someone feeds me them from another source--I haven't got a camera or even a camera phone--so behind the times...)

Chicago Crime is using Google maps to pinpoint the location of crimes committed in the city of Chicago.

They also have RSS feeds providing the latest crime information for a particular beat or block.

...via Smart Mobs

There's a Time Traveler Convention at MIT on Saturday. Tell your time traveling friends.

Great idea, I'd love to help! What should I do?

Write the details down on a piece of acid-free paper, and slip them into obscure books in academic libraries! Carve them into a clay tablet! If you write for a newspaper, insert a few details about the convention! Tell your friends, so that word of the convention will be preserved in our oral history! A note: Time travel is a hard problem, and it may not be invented until long after MIT has faded into oblivion. Thus, we ask that you include the latitude/longitude information when you publicize the convention.

You can also make an absolute commitment to publicize the convention afterwards. In that case, bring a time capsule or whatever it may be to the party, and then bury it afterwards.

Can't the time travelers just hear about it from the attendees, and travel back in time to attend?

Yes, they can! In fact, we think this will happen, and the small number of adventurous time travelers who do attend will go back to their "home times" and tell all their friends to come, causing the convention to become a Woodstock-like event that defines humanity forever.

Unfortunately, we of the present (2005) don't have time travel, and so we only have one chance at observing the convention. If the time travelers don't leave us their secrets, we won't be able to go back in time and see our convention in all its glory unless it is publicized in advance.

...via BoingBoing

This year's nominees are now up.

Or, actually MP3 players in general:

• Some 11% of American adults say they own an iPod or other type of MP3 player. That amounts to over 22 million people.
• Men are more likely to have iPods/MP3 players than women. Some 13% of men have the players, compared to 9% of women.
• Minorities are more likely to own iPods/MP3 players than whites. Some 16% of African-Americans and English-speaking Latinos own iPods/MP3 players, compared to 9% of non-Latino whites.
• Almost one in five (19%) of those ages 18-28 have iPods/MP3 players. Fully 14% of those ages 29-40 have them; and 11% of younger Baby Boomers (ages 41-50) have them. That compares to 6% of older Baby Boomers (ages 51-59), 6% of those 60-69 and 1% of those 70 and older.

Also, more than 6 million Americans are listening to podcasts

Standards for online content authors

Style

Be very concise: aim to reduce text by at least 50%
Use plain English.
Frontload headlines, paragraphs, links and lists.
Use short sentences (21 words maximum).
Use short paragraphs (65 words maximum).
Use "you" and "we" whenever appropriate.

...via elearningpost

43Folders offers April Power Hacks!:

• Pencils are a great way to write things down.
• Sharpen new pencils soon after you’ve bought them, so you can use them to write things down more easily.
• Make sure you put gas in your car, or it won’t run very far after you’ve bought it, and then you’ll have trouble getting to work.
• When you get letters from people, you can send a response by using some paper and one of the pencils I mentioned a little earlier. (Just make sure they’re sharpened!)
• If you have a long list of things to do, make sure to do some of them sometimes. Make pencil marks by the ones that are “finished.”
• When people ask you how you’re doing, it’s okay to say “Great! How about you?” They’ll probably have some kind of response, though, so be ready.

Guessing these are 'specially suited to April.

Ben Hammersley says that the new competition for Google turns out to be Yahoo:

Google's Labs and API were held up as exemplars of a modern internet business, while Yahoo was seen as floundering in a sea of accountants, pop-up ads, and Britney Spears. But Yahoo has learned its lesson. Research.yahoo.com, launched last month, is the same idea as labs.google.com - a showcase for new and interesting projects - but it's better. Unlike Google, Yahoo publishes its papers, names its researchers and says what it is up to. One-nil to Yahoo.

Google's API was also a thing of beauty when it launched. For programmers, the ability to query Google from inside your own programs was immensely useful. And just as Amazon and eBay have done with their APIs, the Google API produced an ecosystem of applications and programming techniques that relied on, and fed, Google's success. It was unique.

But not now. Yahoo's own API is out, and it's better. It has more features, it's more complete, it's technically more elegant, and it's easier to use than Google's alternative. Two-nil to Yahoo.

...via BoingBoing

Cory Doctorow reports on the Life Hacks presentation at O'Reilly's ETech conference:

HACKERS <HEART> PLAIN TEXT

Geeks store what they do in text and spurn big apps, using plain
text editors. Simplicity and speed, ease of search and
extraction, cut and paste. All you need in a filing system.

--

MY OTHER APP IS IN ~/BIN

If it wasn't plaintext, there's one app that they loved, like
mail, Excel, PowerPoint, etc. The rest was little glue scripts in
~/bin, secret scripts they are embarrassed about and don't share
with others, though it turns out that they're all really similar.

--

SUPER PROLIFIC GEEKS DO IT IN PUBLIC WITH COMPLETE STRANGERS AND
LIKE IT. OH YES.

(don't put this on your car)

Geeks get their credibility and prolificness out of sharing
everything -- put it in public and the public organizes it for
you. Put it on a Wiki and others will fix it.

This is just cool

Desktop wallpaper setup to make the screen(s) look transparent.

...via BoingBoing

Mobile PC has a great article (with pictures) outlining the evolution of mobile computing:

1975
IBM 5100 Portable Computer
The first computer with a built-in display, this 50-pound monster was swept under the rug after the PC came out in 1981.

1981
Osborne 1
Adam Osborne's labor of love was an overnight success ... and an overnight failure. Today it is remembered fondly as a pioneer in portability.

1982
GRiD Compass 1100
The first mobile computer with a folding screen, the GRiD Compass was a coveted survivor for more than a decade.

1982
Epson HX-20
The world's first "laptop," designed as a slate with no folding display.

A few months ago, one of our retiring specialists brought back twenty years' worth of luggable, portable, and laptop computers. Looking at the twenty-five plus pound original machines with their two 5.25" floppy drives, I'm guessing we shouldn't complain too much about carrying six and eight pound computers around.

Yahoo! is buying Flickr:

Holy smokes, SOMEBODY out there is bad at keeping secrets!! Yes! We can finally confirm that Yahoo has made a definitive agreement to acquire Flickr and us, Ludicorp. Smack the tattlers and pop the champagne corks!

Woohoo! What does this mean? It means that we'll no longer have to draw straws to see who gets paid, schedule conjugal visits between trips to the colo....wait! That's not what you want to know. This is what you want to know:

What is going to happen to Flickr?

Flickr will be continuing on the path it's on -- to Flickr 1.0 and beyond. We'll be working with a bunch of people that Totally Get Flickr and want to preserve the community and the flavor of what is here. We're going to grow and change, but we're in it for the long haul, with the same management and same team.

Column Two has an article on things to do with online staff directories:

• Include more than just phone numbers
• Provide an effective quick search
• Deliver a dynamic organisational chart
• Provide self-service capability
• Usability test the staff directory
• Ensure the staff directory can be printed
• Include all staff
• Provide extensive cross-linking

...via elearningpost

There's much ongoing discussion on the new Google Toolbar Autolink feature. Cory Doctorow on Boingboing summarizes some of his reasons for thinking it's a good thing and points to other posts, both pro and con.

The web works because it is broken and not owned.

...via The Obvious?

Mind Hacks points us to the one hundred most influential works in cognitive science

If you want to do something that's going to change the world, build software that people want to use instead of software that managers want to buy.

...from Groupware Bad by Jamie Zawinski

Google now has a map feature.

Cutting Through points to Beyond bullets, which talks about research by Virginie Van Wassenhove, concerning the importance of visual communication:

In an age of online this and virtual that, it's nice to hear a little news about the value of a face-to-face. What about webcasting you say? According to Virginie,

"If visual movements lag (instead of naturally preceding) the auditory signal by as little as 50 to 100 milliseconds, the benefit of having visual speech is already diminished."

The average webcam hasn't quite reduced lag by that much, so while you're waiting for technology to catch up, the next time you have a face-to-face, pay attention to the visual speech you see, and how much it contributes to the auditory speech you hear. You just might find that you can understand quite a bit by reading someone's lips, not to mention the rest of their face.

Norm Carr and Tim Meehan talk aboutusing 'use cases', which look at actors (those who will use a site) and their goals, to help deliver a website:

The crucial benefit of use cases is the way they encourage a directed method of considering project requirements. From the very beginning, we are designing a product by concentrating upon the needs and wants of those who will use it.

...via elearningpost

The Shifted Librarian quotes from a New Yorker essay, The 1992 house:

I learned that one of the biggest hardships endured by people back in 1992 was not being able to use cell phones. I had thought that maybe I could just cut back on the number of calls I made, thinking that usage plans were more limited. However, my research (at the library!) unearthed the fact that cell phones really were only humongous car-phone versions, prevalent among early executives in the hip-hop industry….

Not having the use of a cell phone piqued my curiosity regarding how schoolchildren communicated all those years ago. Since my mother was not speaking to me and Larry wasn’t around (he did end up going to Myrtle Beach), I turned to primary sources (in the form of classic cinema) for answers. I found ‘The Breakfast Club’ and ‘Pretty in Pink’ in the library – on videotape. I learned that back in the eighties and nineties students would hand-write things on little pieces of paper called ‘notes’ and try to pass them to each other in class without getting caught….

Phil Windley, former CIO of the State of Utah, has some words of wisdom for those who want to reorganize IT.

I don't agree with him on everything--or, more precisely, probably, everything doesn't apply necessarily to all organizations, but it's interesting stuff:

While I think there’s some merit to reorganizing State IT functions, there is much that could go wrong here. There are a 1000 ways to do this wrong and only a few that will ultimately work.

Danah Boyd writes about the pleasure of browsing paper course catalogs and some of the ways digital catalogs don't measure up.

GM Vice Chairman, Bob Lutz, is blogging, too:

What would you do if you had a brand whose customer service reputation was that high for that long despite having a narrow, aging product lineup? I, for one, would first get down on my knees and thank the Maker for the finest retail network in the industry. Then, I would set to work replenishing the product portfolio.

That’s exactly what we’re doing with Saturn. And that’s precisely why my hopes for the brand are so high. We won’t let the brand fall victim to the tyranny of the “or.” It’s not a case of having a great retail and customer care program or having great products. It’s possible to have both, and we plan to do so. Finally.

An interesting article about a project to bring affordable broadband to a province in India:

According to Ajay Sahni, joint secretary, IT department, the Aksh consortium will also utilise the existing optic fibre lines of companies like Tata Teleservices before establishing its own optic fibre network across the state. Among other customers, the proposed broadband network will provide broadband services to 40,000 government offices across the state. This will enable the government departments to deliver various citizen services through eSeva centres, Rajiv Internet Village Kiosks and web-based online services. The network will also enable the rural folk to access video-conferencing, internet surfing among other facilities.

...via BoingBoing

Ron Avitzur explains how the Graphing Calculator came to be:

I used to be a contractor for Apple, working on a secret project. Unfortunately, the computer we were building never saw the light of day. The project was so plagued by politics and ego that when the engineers requested technical oversight, our manager hired a psychologist instead. In August 1993, the project was canceled. A year of my work evaporated, my contract ended, and I was unemployed.

I was frustrated by all the wasted effort, so I decided to uncancel my small part of the project. I had been paid to do a job, and I wanted to finish it. My electronic badge still opened Apple's doors, so I just kept showing up.

A weblog set up to collect information about relief efforts.

...via BoingBoing

Joe Gandelman gathers blogger accounts of the tsunami that hit the Indian Ocean coastlines:

2004 decided not to go quietly today when the biggest earthquake in 40 years struck deep in the Indian Ocean, triggering massive tsunamis -- wiping out Asian coastal areas and instantly drowning and killing more than 12,000 people.

In a grim reminder that the well-laid plans of holiday goers, governments and politicians hinge on a higher power, the earthquake -- an estimated 9 point magnitude -- struck quickly and without mercy, decimating coastal areas some 1,000 miles away in a record-setting catastrophe. Far away, yet even with newspaper accounts the Internet made it seem MUCH closer...because some local weblogs instantaneously started telling bits of the horrific story...

...via blogdex

Science News has compiled their list of Science News of the Year 2004 including:

Hot stuff An Israeli site yielded the oldest evidence of the controlled use of fire in Asia or Europe, from around 750,000 years ago (May 1, 165: 276*).

Human origins A skull found in a Romanian cave boosted the controversial theory that Neandertals interbred frequently with people (May 22, 165: 328*). Other evidence indicated minimal or no genetic contact between Neandertals and ancient people (March 20, 165: 181), and Stone Age Homo sapiens may have had better memories than Neandertals did (Sept. 18, 166: 183).

Sleep on it Sleep showed signs of improving memories and problem solving (Jan. 24, 165: 53*). Scientists linked an inner-brain structure to the enhancement of spatial memories during sleep (Nov. 6, 166: 294).

Bad traffic Spending time in traffic dramatically increases a person's short-term risk of heart attack, a study found (Nov. 13, 166: 316), and diesel fumes suppressed immunity in rodents (March 13, 165: 174).

D'lightful Benefits linked to vitamin D were extended to anticancer effects, muscle preservation, diabetes prevention, and mitigation of autoimmune diseases (Jan. 31, 165: 77; Oct. 9, 166: 232*, Oct. 16, 166: 248*).

...via BoingBoing

Bruce Sterling gives a Felix Burda Memorial Lecture on 'Shaping Things to Come'.

He begins by discussing six major trends in technology:

1. Interactive chips which provide identity
2. Global Positioning Systems
3. Search engines
4. 3D virtual models
5. Rapid prototyping
6. cradle to cradle recycling

Betsy Devine tells everyone what happens when your husband wins the Nobel prize for physics:

Nobel Prize and math

There is no Nobel Prize for mathematics*--but there's lots of math involved in Nobel Prizes.

Word problems....

1. If 7 of us fly to Stockholm on the redeye, plot our best distribution onto airplane seats, bearing in mind that Amity's husband Colin has very long legs and neither of Frank's parents should have to sit immobilized for too long.
2. Which will be harder and take more time: to find the required white-tie-and-tails Nobel outfit in Boston and lug it to Stockholm, or to figure our how to take 8 different measurements of my husband and then convert them all into metric so that someone in Stockholm can rent the outfit for him?
3. Rank these four events in order of probabability: Lightning will strike Mel Gibson, Lightning will strike Mel Brooks, Betsy Devine will have triplets nine months from now, Frank Wilczek will need to wear white-tie-and-tails to some event unrelated to Nobel Prizes.

Show all calculations, and remember, neatness counts.

...via Jim Moore's Journal

Check out Google Suggest, which guesses at what you're typing, makes real-time suggestions including how many matching items.

...via Dan Gillmor and The Shifted Librarian

Wired offers their guide to cool tools for 2004

Mark Hurst at Good Experience provides a gift guide for parents of geeks.

Robert Scoble and Shel Israel are writing a book on a blog--that is, the writing project is on a blog and it's about (proposal stage currently) blogging in corporations.

• Over four billion Web pages, each an average of 10KB, all fully indexed
• Up to 2,000 PCs in a cluster
• Over 30 clusters
• 104 interface languages including Klingon and Tagalog
• One petabyte of data in a cluster -- so much that hard disk error rates of 10-15 begin to be a real issue
• Sustained transfer rates of 2Gbps in a cluster
• An expectation that two machines will fail every day in each of the larger clusters
• No complete system failure since February 2000

...from an article at ZDnet on Google and how it all works.

...via JoHo the Blog

The City of Philadelphia has signed an agreement with Verizon to provide wireless internet access for the city:

The city of Philadelphia and Verizon Communications Inc. struck an agreement Tuesday that would allow the city to provide wireless Internet access as a municipal service even though Gov. Ed Rendell signed legislation giving Verizon the power to scuttle the project.

Philadelphia's plans are the most ambitious of any major U.S. city to provide free or cheap high-speed wireless to all residents.

This is an exception to the new law that's passed in PA which says that cities can't offer municipal wireless for a fee without the permission of their local phone company.

Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing says:

Windows error on giant Toronto animated billboard are their own cult Internet photo-genre, but this is a great example of the species: an enormous Windows error dialogue-box on the towering billboard across from Toronto's Eaton Centre. It showed up in my RSS feed of images on Flickr tagged with "Toronto."

From the RSS in Government blog comes news that the National Hurricane Center is offering RSS feeds on tropical storm maps and forecasts

Another article, this one at Red Herring, on IM in the workplace:

A recent report by Pew Internet and American Life Project showed that 11 million people use an IM service at work, and 53 million have used it at home or in the office. But those numbers have yet to translate into a lucrative market. By the end of this year, IM conversations will generate $131 million in revenues. But by 2008, that figure is predicted to jump to $413 million, according to the Radicati Group, a technology market research company in Palo Alto, California.

I've been on vacation for the last two weeks. Had a lovely time.

Things should be getting back to regular updates real soon now...

Amy Gahran at Contentious suggests that proper grammar and punctuation on the web is evolving:

These considerations can help guide grammar and punctuation choices in your online writing:

It's not print. Most formal rules of English grammar and punctuation were developed to suit written (printed) communication, and they still work very well in that environment. However, print is only one medium -- and in coming decades it may cease to be the most common communication channel in many geographic regions or sectors of society.

It's a challenging visual environment. Text and images (both visual vehicles) are the primary ways to transmit messages via computer. Unfortunately, today's computer screens remain a more difficult physical environment for reading, thanks to lower resolution, flicker, lighting, etc.

Small punctuation gets lost. Look at your keyboard -- the most commonly used English punctuation marks are small. In print, punctuation marks serve to enhance the perceived flow of words. However, on a computer screen commas, periods, semicolons, colons, apostrophes, and many other common punctuation marks are simply hard to see. Therefore, less punctuation and bigger punctuation marks are usually more effective in online content. This is why the em-dash (a long hyphen: --) tends to be used more liberally online than in print. SimSimilarly, semicolons (;) tend to be used sparingly in web content – they’re too visually innocuous to play the key structural role that they often do in print.

...via elearningpost

Yesterday, Floyd and I gave our presentation on Extending Information Services through Syndication at the NETC conference. After that, we were on the road all day driving back to Iowa and this is the first chance I've had to blog the presenation and put our Powerpoint slides online.

If you're interested in the slides, you can find them here.

Basically, we talked about syndication (specifically RSS, Atom and Web services that use RSS feeds to exchange information automatically) and how people in extension can use it to extend their information services. We talked syndication from two perspectives--as a tool for finding information and as a tool for distributing information.

Many syndication tools are freeware, free online services, or inexpensive shareware. So, syndication is something that can provide a high impact on content availability at a low cost.

More information can be found at the ACE2004 weblog that I did with Ray Kimsey and Blair Fannin. It's got lots of links to aggregators and articles and other resources.

We had good attendance, lots of good questions and could have spent more time on what other people are doing with syndication too.

From the NETC conference, Floyd Davenport and Dan Cotton are presenting through Breeze to the Iowa State University Extension Annual Conference. The setup is on one computer and then they're connecting via another computer.

It's a demo of Breeze and a discussion of e-Extension.

We're connecting from the Stewart Center at Purdue to the Scheman Center at ISU. Floyd is talking about the technology of Breeze Live. We're just beginning to use this technology at Iowa and plan to use it for online collaborations, program delivery and both live and recorded presentations. The biggest issue that we've had with Breeze Live and are still learning to work with is the lag in video and audio. This lag goes up and down so that sometimes the talking isn't completely related to the video. Breeze Live does allow freezing the video, which sometimes works better (plus cutting down on bandwidth).

Floyd is demo-ing the pieces of Breeze including uploading content, videos, Powerpoint presentations, polling, chat, documents, etc.

Dan is going to be talking about e-Extension, a variation on his keynote talk yesterday. Today's talk for ISU's Annual Conference will be geared less toward the tech side that appeals to the NETC audience and more toward Extension in general. And Dan's talking now...

We've switched to slides/audio only for this portion of the session which eliminates such things as--is he looking at the camera, is the voice and video synced, etc. And it makes the slides larger on the remote screens.

I'm not going to repeat the e-Extension talk here. But I will see if there are any questions and report on those when we get to them...

Questions--

(comment) people would have liked to see a video with the slides (we went to slides only during the presentation (video can be distracting...but no video can be boring...)

(question) can I use Breeze with stuff you don't support (yes, but , remember, if it's stuff we don't support, we don't support it)

(question) can our clients download stuff to use it (there's nothing to download--they just need to know the link to get to it)

(question) ok, missed this one, but the answer has to do with how much bandwidth you need

(question) talk about how to set up a conference--how can people who aren't extension use the system. (deb hopes we're not just going to turn people (non-extension people, that is) loose on it (yikes!) Floyd says we will get accounts for Extension staff and then they can deliver it to their clients, provide information on how to access, etc.)

(question) ok, missed this one too. Something about who gets to be a presenter.

And the presentation is over (or nearly).

I like this live-blogging, kind of fun...

So, I’m at NETC and if I were a good blogger, I’d have been carrying my laptop to all the sessions and blogging live (there’s wireless and everything). But I am far from the perfect blogger and although I can and do take lots of notes during presentations (mostly questions that occur to me but may or may not have anything to do with the talk at hand) I rarely am able to write my conclusions until I have time to walk away and think about what was said, what notes/questions I’ve written down and how it all works together. Sometimes, unfortunately, I never have time to do formulate conclusions or write them down. Sometimes, I suspect, that’s why bloggers live-blog--write it down and move on--leave it to others to do with it as they will.

But, back to the subject at hand, the keynote speaker for today’s (now yesterday, actually, when this is posted) session of NETC was Dan Cotton who is the new director of e-extension. E-extension is a concept that’s been under discussion for several years, a tool that will help make Extension’s expertise and services available to new audiences in ways that are convenient, immediate, and accessible. It’s a concept that’s been much discussed and much planned and yet, in the way of new electronic things, is still very much an amorphous, not-really-sure-yet-what-it-is thing (and, to be honest, I think that’s its best feature at present).

It’s good stuff and it’s cool that it’s happening and in a time of difficult budget issues, it’s a big commitment by extension to fund e-extension. In addition to Dan Cotton as the new director, Kevin Gamble will be the Associate Director for Information Technology, Carla Craycraft and Craig Wood will be Associate Directors for Content. I’m not going to spend a lot of time on what Dan said. If you want to know more details visit the website. From here on in this post, I’m going to talk about stuff I’d like to see in addition to what’s generally talked about in the context of e-Extension.

Three things I’d like to see:

• A blog for anyone in extension who wants one
• Emergent capability (never forget this: on the internet what gets used is more important that what’s excellent; or, looked at another way--what gets used determines what's excellent)
• Online dialogues on controversial research topics (extension as facilitators for dialogues about things that affect people’s lives)

There should be as little governing policy as necessary to do the job (look at Harvard, University of Minnesota Libraries, Sun Microsystems, and Robert Scoble's Corporate Weblog Manifesto

‘Seeking information’ is only a small part of what people are doing online. We cannot be successful simply as a dispenser of information. Or, more accurately, we can be successful if we put a lot of effort into it and do it very, very well, but we will not be astonishing. I want to be astonishing.

We will also be much more successful if we expand our vision beyond what people will receive from us--we must be ready to receive knowledge from them as well. The web is a conversation. e-Extension is our opportunity to embrace that conversation. Dan Gillmor (We the Media) says that the thing it pays for him to know as a journalist--to embrace, really--is that his readers know more than he does. We need to embrace this too. We may have many experts, but if we look at all of Extension’s clientele and at everything they bring to the table, collectively they will always know more than we do. And that’s a good thing.

One reason this is so important is that we don’t know what the next great important thing is that Extension can do for people or that people can do for us. No one knows. Being open, flexible, self-organizing, and emergent will make it less necessary for us to know upfront what the next great thing is--we can’t know anyway; no one knows until it’s there--so our best shot at being successful will be to put in place systems that give us room to try things and see what happens.

It’s about the contact, the conversation, and the community as much (or more) than the content. It is also about putting things out there, encouraging energy, taking risks and seeing what will happen. People won't come to us because we're never wrong, never untidy, and never less than our best. They'll come because they trust us. And they will trust us because they know us, because we're there with things they want when they want them, and because we're engaged in conversation with them everyday.

Dan said today that he wants e-Extension to be a remarkable thing. I want it to be more than that, I want it to be a place where remarkable things happen.

===

This is not at all as coherent as I would like it to be and it definitely doesn't include everything I wanted to say (for one thing I want to go on a bit about communities of practice at some later point) but I’ll leave it here for now.

I'm in West Lafayette, IN at the NETC 2004 conference. We're staying at The Union Club Hotel on the Purdue University campus. Today is pre-conference stuff (registration, tours, and kickoff panels). Tomorrow the bulk of the conference starts. Our talk is on Wednesday (which I think I mentioned before, but I'm too lazy to go back and check).

The Shifted Librarian talks about instant messaging's broader social implications for libraries:

Which, of course, is where libraries come in. Back in the 1990s, libraries debated whether email was a valid use of public computers, and now we're having that same discussion about instant messaging.

And you know what? The answer is the same - patrons using the internet to communicate, connect, exchange information, or just plain chat is indeed a valid use of public terminals. We have to get over this issue now because when we don't let them IM in the library, we're telling them that we don't value their preferred method of communication, whether it's with their friends or with librarians. We're telling them that the library is not a place for instant messaging, so go somewhere else to do it.

Except that they are going to go somewhere else and do it (at least, those that can), and they're not going to come back and they're not going to think of the library when they think of instant messaging. Would your library find that attitude acceptable if we replace "IM" with "email?" How about if we replace "IM" with "telephone?"

I quote the whole long piece above because I don't just think it's applicable to IM and libraries but to where people get their information, who they talk to, who they trust and who they want to bring education and services to their communities. It applies to Extension and to universities. We need to continue to think about weblogs and RSS and IM and email and other ways of distributing information and, most importantly, of having conversations with people. If we don't continue to adopt new methods, even ones we're not completely comfortable with, people will go elsewhere to get the information they want and the expertise, learning, and personal and community development they're seeking.

You know those pictures where the eyes seem to follow you around the room?

Well, it seems research has revealed why that happens:

“The core idea is simple: no matter what angle you look at a painting from, the painting itself doesn’t change. You’re looking at a flat surface. The pattern of light and dark remains the same,” Todd said.

“We found that our visual perception of a picture also remains largely unchanged as we look at it from different vantage points. If a person in a painting is looking straight out, it will always appear that way, regardless of the angle at which it is viewed.”

It was probably cooler when we just thought it was magic...

I keep sticking things in here in draft format that I want to post or comment on or do something with, but I've been too busy to actually get them published. But I haven't disappeared and I'll get caught up soon....

There's a geek truth that says something along the lines--all applications expand until they include email. The non-geek corollary is that