One

I'm going to start using a new blog at http://valeski.org/one

It's feed URL is http://valeski.org/atom.xml


valeski at 10:48:20 PM MDT Permalink | Blog about this entry |  Add to del.icio.us |  digg this This entry has 0 comments: Add your own

I find twitter funny on so many levels. One that jumps out at me is the attention deficit disorder that twitter perpetuates. As if we're not sliced and diced enough these days with media coming at us from so many angles on so many different topics, now we can post, and read, bite-sized chunks of whatever we feel like talking about. The "bite sized" nature of twitter separates it from traditional "blogging."

The "reality TV" of blogging has hit a new level with twitter and "nano-blogging." As the volume of twitterers increases, the relative quality of content will decrease. Just like blogs degraded the quality of editorial content at large, nano-blogging will bring it down yet another level. With that said, opening up writing to a greater number of users will obviously un-earth some true writing genius.

Anyway, what I really wanted to write about was the difference between explicit data collection, and implicit. While explicit data collection services like twitter, Flickr, and blogs capture a mind boggling amount of interesting information, they're all still rooted in a fundamentally limited, event driven form of data collection. While limited, you can still do some interesting analysis of said data; a friend of mine did some fun and interesting analysis on twitter posts.

Things really change when our lives are truly, implicitly and passively, monitored.

Imagine a necklace that captures 24 hours of audio and video. Now imagine wearing that necklace 24 hours a day, and it sync'ing each day. Upon each sync, the collected data is processed, and all of your activity (who you saw, who saw you, who you talked with, who talked with you, what you did, where you went, what you saw, etc...) is broken down, logged, and analyzed. Obviously the technology needed for this level of broad data processing doesn't exist, but it's an interesting notion.

Perhaps we won't ever get comfortable enough with sensing and monitoring to go this far. Perhaps we'll only ever be comfortable with pro-active, explicit, data sharing. I believe history is showing us otherwise though. We're seeing a conscious degradation of privacy. "Reality TV" is the tip of the ice-berg. Many people today expose much of their lives to the online world. This exposure, to date, has largely been in the form of pro-active, explicit, data sharing. As a result, it isa very limited view of our lives and activities. It is a highly editorialized view of things. As we grow tired and bored of this censored/editorialized stream of information, the next step is implicit, passive, yet controllable, data sharing.

Taking large chunks of our activity and passively collecting information about it takes today's notion of information sharing and removes the self censorship and editorialization. This gives us a true view into our activity, how we think, what we do, and so on.

Me.dium, my employer, gives users the ability to implicitly share their click-stream/attention-stream with other users (anonymously, or otherwise). As a result, your friends (or everyone) can see what you're doing as you surf the web. While entertaining, the true value is in the processing of all the data Me.dium collects. Me.dium aggregates everyone's attention-streams and correlates URLs amongst the population. The result is a "match set" of URLs that represent the sites people visit when trying to accomplish a particular task. For example, if you're looking for information about military aircraft, Me.dium can recommend the URLs that others most regularly visited, relative to the URLs you're visiting and the searches you're conducting. You can see what others did while exploring a particular topic. It's a great example of the value of processing implicitly collected data.

We also correlate users, and chat conversations that are algorithmically relevant to you as a user. We're just getting the service off the ground, and after you use it for awhile, you can't imagine browsing without it. As we tune our system to enhance the correlations, things will only get better. Me.dium is generally focused on "online" activities, but back to my "necklace" concept (its not mine, by the way, someone else talked about it years ago) the analysis and correlation that can be done with more and more data can truly start to change things.

While all the current, pro-active, explicit data collection tools and services are fun and entertaining, I'm looking forward to more productive uses of data as passive, implicit collection becomes more mainstream. We all have to work to ensure we don't wind up in some sort of "skynet"/1984 conundrum however. Any kind of sensing service/framework must build in fine grained user control.

valeski at 11:48:32 PM MDT Permalink | Blog about this entry |  Add to del.icio.us |  digg this This entry has 0 comments: Add your own

My entire family is sick with the flu. My four year old son got it first, and is only now recovering; he's had it for six days now. I got it second, and thought I was feeling better this morning, but am bed ridden again; I've had it for three days now. My 18 month old daughter started showing symptoms 24 hours ago; about the same time my wife did.

I'm in a state of fever induced delirium at the moment; in and out for three days now. So, I don't know a) why I'm blogging about this, or b) what I'm actually saying :-).

This sucks! It's just miserable when the whole family comes down with something so nasty. Colds come and go, here and there; part of life. When true flu hits, it's a whole different ballgame. People become incapacitated. The whole operation shuts down when mom gets this sick. She's the sliver of hope for the family when we're all in such pain, and when she falters, everything goes up exponentially.

The only thing keeping me going is the thought of our immune systems becoming that much stronger as a result of going through this.

If you read this far, sorry I took you through this whining session.


valeski at 3:28:00 PM MDT Permalink | Blog about this entry |  Add to del.icio.us |  digg this This entry has 0 comments: Add your own

Earlier today I added some DATA URIs to a blog entry I was putting together. I was in a situation in which I couldn't host the images anywhere, and they were under 250 bytes each, so I couldn't reference them via HTTP, and nor would I want all the HTTP overhead for these small images.

It had been awhile since I'd used DATA, so I tested on Firefox, Safari, then IE7. Firefox, check... Safari, check... IE7, nope!? I assumed I'd screwed something up because not supporting data: URIs made no sense at all. Sure enough, IE7 doesn't support the scheme. It's beyond me as to why. I'd put DATA into Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox long ago, so I was sad to see the lack of support in IE. What makes it particularly funny is that in lieu of rendering the image data itself, IE lays out a generic box with the text "embedded image" in it. Instead of telling me it's an embedded image, maybe just render the data instead!

valeski at 7:42:16 PM MDT Permalink | Blog about this entry |  Add to del.icio.us |  digg this This entry has 0 comments: Add your own

I'm somewhere between an amateur photographer and a pro; trending toward the amateur side of that scale. I outgrew my point-and-shoot about six months ago, and wound up with a Canon EOS 30D DSLR. I'm loving the SLR, and am happily shooting in RAW now that disk capacity is effectively free these days. iPhoto has always been a poor photo management application in my opinion; anything beyond casual use and it falls down. A couple of years ago I moved to iView Media Pro, which has killer asset management facilities, but severely lacks even semi-serious photo editing facilities. The services it provides are elementary at best. I started a quest for its replacement and wound up with Aperture 1.5.

Along the way to Aperture, I stopped at Adobe Lightroom Public Beta 4. While thoroughly impressed with both (it's practically a coin toss), they both have a severe deficiency; lacking support for video file management. Most cameras these days shoot video, and the thought of having to manage video separately from still shots is beyond me. iView Media Pro has done this since day one, and I'm really bummed that the new wave of DAM products are leaving it out. I get that serious photogs don't mess with video necessarily, but if the DAM applications want exposure to a massive marketplace (the semi-pro/amateur photog) all they have to do is add support for video management. To be clear I'm not suggesting video editing facilities be incorporated into modern DAMs (although that would be nice), just that managing video file location alongside my pics be part of the feature set.

Easy to do, and opens the apps up to a whole new tier of consumer.

I can hear the Product Managers for Aperture and Lightroom scoffing at the suggestion that their apps be used by non-pros. Just add video file location management (and allow importing of said files) and I'd be happy; am I asking that much?


valeski at 8:12:24 PM MST Permalink | Blog about this entry |  Add to del.icio.us |  digg this This entry has 0 comments: Add your own

I was discussing the idea of devices recharging themselves from ambient radio waves (of which there are obviously plenty) with some friends a couple of years ago. I was generally looked at with doubtful eyes and there was plenty of chuckling going on.

A friend of mine just blogged about a company doing precisely this; Powercast. Granted they're not using ambient noise (yet), but they're doing it; wireless battery recharging from up to 30' away in some specialized cases. Too cool!


valeski at 7:51:26 PM MST Permalink | Blog about this entry |  Add to del.icio.us |  digg this This entry has 0 comments: Add your own

I find it interesting how groups of people produce nomenclature specific to things the group is doing. The words that pop out of software companies are always funny to consider outside the walls of the company itself. Not that me.dium was the first to use these terms, but I thought I'd jot down some of the funny ones that have surfaced over here.

Friending (v) - the process of two users becoming friends.
Auto-Friending (v) - the process of two users automatically becoming friends in the system (e.g. userA invited userB to the system).
Friend-requesting (v) - the process of a user asking another user to be their friend.
Invitor (n) - a user who has invited another to me.dium.
Invitee (n) - a person who has been invited to me.dium.
Blue People (n) - anonymous people surfing the internet.
Yellow People (n) - friends surfing the internet.
Orange Person (n) - me surfing the internet.

Anyway, it's funny listening to a bunch of people using these words/phrases all day long.

I remember when "URL" was a new one back in the Netscape days.


valeski at 3:02:30 PM MST Permalink | Blog about this entry |  Add to del.icio.us |  digg this This entry has 0 comments: Add your own

We have gotten just over three feet of snow here in Downtown Boulder over the past week. I haven't seen snow like this in Boulder in over ten, maybe 15 years; it's great!

Of course we had several itinerary resets with friends and family coming in from out of state for the holidays, but eventually things settled and everyone made it into town. DIA closed completely for a day and a half.

A friend of mine twisted my arm enough and finally got me to take up cross-country skiing which has been a blast. We've been touring around town on the streets and sidewalks. Earlier today we made it over to North Boulder Park where the Nordic club sets up a track throughout the park. The local paper ran a decent, albeit horribly titled, article about the Park and club today.

My son received a "flexible flyer" sled for Christmas and we've been pulling him around town on it. He's been having a good time on it, and it's really fun to think about our daily "walking" routine including a sled.

It has been a winter wonderland here this season. Part of me hopes Colorado will start seeing serious winters like this again. The past decade has had such mild winters, things have been kind of boring.

valeski at 8:18:46 PM MST Permalink | Blog about this entry |  Add to del.icio.us |  digg this This entry has 0 comments: Add your own

I'm a keyboard navigator; mice are for kids. As much as I think keyboards are one of the most horrible invention for input, there forever faster than a mouse when you're driving complex actions on a computer. As a keyboard navigator, I live and die by keyboard shortcuts.

I need Firefox/Gecko to solve something that industry has solved in most other applications with "auto-save." As the web becomes more and more "2-way" and users are entering more and more data into web forms (blog entries, comments, discussion boards), that data is at risk of being lost. Google's (I'm sure someone else did it first) done a great job with docs.google.com in this regard; I never have to think about saving. They've correctly taken it to the extreme of literally disabling the ability to save something; everything's always "saved." I've lost several hours over the past few years to accidental keyboard shortcut conflicts or fat fingering. While editing text in a form, and using character/word selection keyboard combos to select text for deletion/overwriting, I can't count how many times I've hit the browser back/forward navigation keyboard combos, and as a result, I've lost all the text I'd entered into a particular form. Incredibly frustrating.

From blogs to wikis, I suspect we've taken a step backward with respect to data safety while editing; this needs to be fixed.

I'm writing this entry in a text editor that supports auto-save. When I'm done, I'll copy/paste it into my blog editor. This is a sad workaround to something the browser should just solve for me.

I realize it's a non-trivial problem, basically getting into serializing user added text alongside a page that has all sorts of security/privacy knobs and dials to prevent just this sort of thing, but, it's needed.

If I keep losing work, my fault or not, while working on wiki pages, I'll eventually stop using them.

I need an "auto-save" equivalent for forms on web pages. It needs to work with SSL pages, HTTP GET, and POST. Thank you.

valeski at 3:47:13 PM MST Permalink | Blog about this entry |  Add to del.icio.us |  digg this This entry has 2 comments: Show Recent | Add your own

I'm a few weeks into working at me.dium, and the differences between a big multi-billion dollar company and small start-up are really sinking in. The excitement level here is invigorating. Knowing everyone in the company provides a level of mission, and capability, understanding that large companies lose. Big companies can obviously scale, but distance naturally grows between the board's goals, and what the troopers on the ground are doing day in and out. That's probably fine most of the time because a big company has big dollars (cash or debt) to spend on the inefficiencies, and gets itself from point A to B. A small firm literally can't afford these inefficiencies for very long (though it has others).

I'm loving the tight coupling between dollars and activity at a startup. Every dollar matters and people are aware of the value received in exchange for that dollar. Large companies (at least those I've been involved with) abstract the connection between that value and the actual dollar spent into oblivion; you lose track of the revenue-expense feedback loop which is vital.

I'm really enjoying the constant push/pull of the fight-to-live atmosphere here. Minute to minute, things change. Your assumptions in the morning can be drastically different in the afternoon. While challenging, it's great mental exercise; a true growth opportunity for all those involved.

Personality dynamics are present at all times; this is both good and bad. In a large firm, you can carve out a portion of the organization to include/exclude folks. You can build your own "click" (not that I ever did this (I hope), but peers of mine certainly did) or navigate to a "safe place" in the firm. In a small firm, everyone's in the room, all the time. You're forced to deal with any conflict and friction, right there, on the spot; much more healthy in the end.

Onward and upward!


valeski at 3:30:36 PM MST Permalink | Blog about this entry |  Add to del.icio.us |  digg this This entry has 0 comments: Add your own