I get my news from Brooklyn Joe...

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Brooklyn BloggEd: Oregon Budget Woes
I find it somewhat ironic and somewhat wonderful that I get the New York Times delivered to my door in Portland, Oregon. I find it so for two reasons. First, I love The Times. Have since I first went to college at Indiana and would wait at the student union as it was delivered late in the day to the bookstore. Now it comes to my door each morning, and I like that and I marvel at it. Secondly I find it ironic because I have come to know Joe Luft of Brooklyn BloggEd through our weblog work. From reading someone's site you get to know the person and you see what he or she cares about. I think Joe cares about kids, and as an extension, cares about the children of Oregon. I believe that because he has on several occasions pointed to articles from The Times about Portland and Oregon and our pathetic school funding situation. The irony is that in the morning Joe walks out and picks up the paper, 3 hours or so later I do the same and we open it up and we read the same articles and we both shake our heads.

I 'm glad he does. I'm glad someone out there is watching. Like in many states we are mortgaging our future in the name of tax cuts and tightening our belts. Joe and I have lamented about Oregon turning into a west coast Mississippi. For a long time the worst thing you could say about a state is to compare its education system to Mississippi. For a number of years everyone laughed at those jokes... I think now in retrospect, a more nervous laugh, but a laugh none the less. Now through the hard lens of experience... well it isn't that damn funny. We owe the children of Mississippi and their hard working teachers and families an apology. Because you realize these are real students, these are real families, and these are real communities that are experiencing this pain. It’s not funny to have an education system that is wanting.

Dan Gillmor on Apple's Music Store

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Silicon Valley - Dan Gillmor's eJournal - iTunes Music Store, a Tryout The best feature, of course, is breaking the industry's album mentality into what customers have wanted for years: individual tunes. (I'm of two minds on this, having recorded two albums when I was playing music for a living (a long time ago, sigh). One of the albums was designed as a complete work, and I believe it holds up that way and should be listened to as a single piece. The other had several tunes I would cheerfully omit if I were downloading it today. Of course, it's the customer's choice, not mine, right?)

I have been playing with the new iTunes and Apple's Music Store for the past few days. So far I'm liking it. One feature that I find interesting is the ability to share/stream my iTunes library over the net. I can also connect to others. For example look at the screen garb image to the left. You will notice that I am connected to a co-workers iTunes library at work and also to another iTunes user out on the net. We are sharing our music, but not by copying, but by streaming it to each other...

More About Hydra

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matt jones | work & thoughts Matt Jones comments on the use of Hydra at ETech and how it differs from some of the other collaborative tools being used there. I'm looking forward to showing the students in my Pacific University class Hydra and letting them play with it a bit next week.

ETech Session Notes and Final Thoughts...

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Trevor Smith has posted session notes from the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference. These were taken by several folks collaboratively using a Rendezvous aware application called Hydra. Hydra is a Rendezvous based collaborative writing application. If you are a Mac OS X user, you should check out this program. I plan to use at a meeting on Monday.

O'Reilly also has some of the presentation slides up on their site. Others will follow in the next few days.

Final Thoughts...
The atmosphere at ETech is part summer camp, part doctorial dissertation. Lots of very interesting and creative people. It's funny, you turn around and the guy next to you in the coffee line looks familiar. You nod hello and get your coffee... walk away... and a few minutes later it hits you... "Hey that guy is Jeff Bezos!..."

I posted earlier about Tom Hoffman's session. Tom is doing some very interesting work. If you ever run into him, be sure to ask him about his Steve Jobs moment... :-)

The collaborative nature of the sessions was something amazing. Between IRC, Confab, iChat, Hydra, the Wiki, and yes even the speakers at the front of the room... information was flying around. It was a great experience. This would be a great venue for education folks to hook up at. A lot of the technology that was being discussed will find its way into schools... of course we all know the old saying about the overhead projector and how it took 20 years to get it from the bowling alley to the classroom. Would be fun to work with folks to shorten and shape the migration...

I am attending NECC in June in Seattle with a group of folks from work, and plan to introduce them to some of the tools used at O'Reilly ETech.
Maybe even set up a Wiki for the event. If others are going lets get together and play a bit...

Smart Dust, Talk, Tags, And Robofiles

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O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference 2003

Catalyzed by the convergence of microsystems, radio frequency indentification tags, wireless networks, and nanotechnology, the dream of ubiquitous computing is becoming a reality. Microscopic machines chattering across ad-hoc networks are beginning to provide us with information and insights about the world around us while enabling us to interact with computers, and each other, in profoundly different ways.

Cory Doctrow's notes from this session...

Google Talk at ETech... and Hydra

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Google, Innovation, and the Web
 Craig Silverstein, Google, Inc.

Craig Silverstein of Google is currently giving his keynote. It is mostly about the work environment and culture of the place.
A very interesting aside is that many in the audience are using a coolaborative note taking software called Hydra.

Click for larger image...

About Hydra:A Rendezvous based, collaborative text editor
Editing documents in groups can be a challenge. Versioning systems like cvs or subversion can help your group to keep a consistent copy of your document, but don't go that extra mile. Wouldn't it be great to edit the same document, live, in realtime, together with everyone in your group?

I'll post the notes after the talk... The notes below were taken by several folks attending the session utilizing Hydra...A Rendezvous based, collaborative text editor

Google, Innovation, and the Web April 25, 2003 - O'Reilly ETCon Craig

======================================================

This is new info not products or vision a process for how we make google products

Google ingredients: mission statement organize the world't information make it universally accessible and useful refs google catelogues, google on cells mission statement actually keeps google busy, yet focused do things that matter attract people who want to matter flexibility to "not be evil" relentless focus on the user resisted pop-ups, despite needing money invented inline text (pyrad style) ads google labs used to refine ideas that they like, but don't know how to implement users take part in the experiments since search engine switching cost is low, google remains focused on the user brilliant people have good ideas a creative environment helps beanbags! [that's so Xerox PARC in the 70's (we did all that with etherphone! *smile)]

A process that works: ideas come from everywhere (employee, management, external people) collection is important collection in ways that users can't see touchgraph google browser [1] design for users Larry Page, the origin of "PageRank" name design early, design often shows early google splash (speed, ease,...) compile, discuss, prioritize compile: top 100 list of projects that google wants to do, prio by importance built on PARC's sparrow (like Wiki) [2] discuss: relaxed product discussion forums 5 to 10 minutes about changes to the list evaluate: graph usage (jump at new partner for wireless access in October ... Danger?) kill unused projects small teams are fast and agile communication is key Tools to organise editable webpages it looks like a form for people to sign-off before launch weekly snippets posts small details of what they've done each week takes 45 mins to read each week weblogs loads of speculation in the press: No one speculated that they might use it internally. first thing that Blogger team suggested. great ideas that people have determine great products.

Design Process User studies get the really obvious bugs out of way. First user-study ever had feedback like this: "I'm waiting for the rest of it" "Is this some guy's homepage" "How many people work in this company" "Are you from the psych department." Experiment Labs allows people to experiment internally.

Hiring Doesn't look for experience so much as ideas. One hiring committee that goes through every CV that comes in. Separates the hiring process from the headcount process. Keeping up the standards for hiring is more important than everything else. VERY CONSERVATIVE HIRING PROCESS. Only ever hired one or two people that were not a benefit to Google. The bad employers are the time-sinkers.

Experimentation and Implementation process (News) Not practical to have anorexic news page Iterative process (three slides about Google News)

Did the web change everything? Maybe not, but... We wouldn't have had Google Early and pre-web could use very bad search engines Small levels of information Wouldn't have been able to share this technology without web interface We wouldn't be able to communicate internally so well Memos don't wor as well as editable web-pages Feeback - we couldn't have had the amount of feedback Logs about how people use their product Advertising software is effective cos it's fast Ads are dropped if they're not clicked on User-focus

STAY TRUE TO YOUR MISSION: never undestimate luck - Google in right place in right time... know your mission statement get people doing something *useful*

=========================== External refs: [1] http://touchgraph.sourceforge.net/ [2] http://www2.parc.com/istl/projects/sparrow/ Google celebrates the Double Helix today ( http://www.google.com/ )

Tom Hoffman Presentation: Social Software in School Reform

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Tom Hoffman Presentation at ETech: Successfully implementing progressive school reforms is an infamously difficult task. Traditional American high schools are atomically organized to minimize interdependence between different classes and exchange flexibility for predictability.

Tom Hoffman is giving a great presentation...(download a copy in PDF)
Performance based assessment ...curriculum standards in xml... easy data entry for teachers... RSS... Trackback... This guy is good...