Unrelated: I wonder how many search referrers I'll get due to the title, now that I'm using reeferss I'll know right away.

It seems like an apt analogy, I have to build up some internal pressure due to outside heat in order to post a new entry here, every so often. But that's not where it came from, it's really a statement that my intentions for blogging are more for self enjoyment than for others, and somehow that says "popcorn" to me.

I wish I could talk more about some of the things I've been working on, but that will happen in due time. It's definitely keeping me busy, possibly more challenged than I've ever been, and I do enjoy being challenged (intended)!

While my head is in the silicon sand (silicorn here in Iowa I suppose) I'm catching waves going on, one of them Dave is stirring up just this weekend. Something feels fundamental here, between open source, participatory and social mediums, and invention... and I can't put my finger on it yet, but I know it's powerful and foundational.

Our group of local "geek inventors" hiding out here between the corn cattle and soybeans have for years now tossed around the idea of collaborating to form a tech incubator, much along the same principles that Dave outlines. Intentions strong, actions weak. That says something though, I'm sure we're not alone, and if digg should teach us anything, just find a way for all the weak actions to be connected and you have yourself a force of peers.

Inspired.

I always enjoy a good crazy-hard engineering brainstorm blivet. Here's a few random ones I can remember from the last week or so:

Laptop ones (inspired by the whole MacBook Pro thing today): A removable keyboard, bluetooth and lithium ion battery built in that recharges when docked inside the laptop. A LCD display on the top/front of the lid, so you have two, you can close the lid and have a tablet or when running display wallpaper or whatever, play games like battleship, use the built-in camera to make it "transparent" (that would be wicked cool). Why don't we have GPS built into laptops yet?

How about a small video-ipod-screen sized lcd usb attachment that becomes a video output source, so you can watch video without taking up space on your screen, display statistics in it, alerts, and so on...

Another USB attachment that is a dense grid of electromagnets and a smooth surface with small magnetic shapes, so that you can use software to physically move the objects on the surface around. Useful? Probably not. Cool? Heck yeah.

You know these things? Either with robotics or (again) electromagnetics control and detect the state of each pin, then set up a web service to connect two devices. Yes, send actual 3d touch and shape sensation over the Internet. No, I wasn't thinking of the pr0n uses when it crossed my mind (but other's immediately pointed it out, thanks guys).

Is anyone shipping a MEMS chip that can control the reflection of a laser in a very small form factor yet, and affordably? Perfect USB toy, just plug it in and draw stuff on the wall near you, so many fascinating uses!

I know the whole e-paper keyboard thing is already out there (and I can't wait, seriously, if you can hit the control key and the keys change to show you what they become (with full word or pictures even!). Can we start maybe with just the function keys? What about a row above them that are simply touch sensitive and perfectly flat, for brightness control, volume, etc? Ooh, even better, how about down the side of the screen and just slide your finger for brightness control there, or even scrolling?

How about e-paper for identification and last-known-state on computer systems, hard drives, components, and so on? I could go on and on for e-paper stuff.

Ok, enough for tonight, hope someone enjoys, or maybe I will when something like this shows up *someday*.

I'm not opposed to the Semantic Web, but nor am I a believer in it's salvation. I applaud the effort and believe that it inspires things I care about, like microformats, but it's an empty hope for the Web's future.

My experience of the progression of the web, and content in general, is that we're serving humans first for delivery. Everyone's experience of the progression of technology is the same, faster and better, more more more. Just follow these to their ends, and it's absolutely inevitable that technology will simply become capable of understanding the content on the Web that was meant for human consumption. If a person can grok what a page says, eventually so can software (considering that Google does just an O.K. job today).

Secondarily, when you have limited resources, which is better here: serving a wider audience (computers/software in addition to humans, by spending your resources adding semantic value to the content), or generating/serving more content? I'm going to side with more content is always better when you have to make a choice. Of course when there's no price to pay, when you can derive and bundle more markup with existing content for little to no cost, absolutely it's a good thing. But, when a choice has to be made between spending time making content better or adding more, more should win, hands down.

So what the Semantic Web is ultimately competing against here is both time and market forces, time for CPUs to get faster and Natural Language Processing software to get smarter, and market forces to utilize available resources optimizing for volume over (markup) quality for human audiences.

It's simply going to fill in the niches where there's the luxury of existing unformatted context to be encoded in content streams, and the idea itself will birth many useful trends drawing attention to structuring content more sensibly (microformats again).

So, it's hard to tell if I'm talking about 2005, or predicting 2006, but either way I feel positive about the events of the past and those to come in respect to Individuals.

It may not seem like much on the grand scale of things, but all of the fuss over web 2.0 is really just bringing more focus on the power of an individual to contribute something valuable to a group. This has been true forever online, IMDB, Amazon, and so many other examples, but now it's not only one of the ways you can use the network but also one of the things that defines the network, net-work.

This past year might just be the coming of age for Individuals demonstrating their contributory value to networked systems and content. I really hope and have a sense that it's just setting the stage for wide-scale global levels of adoption and growth. In my experience in technology circles this feels much like open source and free software, in some form having been around for 20 (or longer conceptually) years, but only very recently is it finally having wide adoption outside of specific vertical tasks.

So what can we look forward to? Well, we'll have to face a number of important challenges to ramp up, the most fundamental of which is of course Identity, and I'm concerned that immediately following is that of an even more loosely defined term that everyone has differing opinions on: Trust. These aren't new thoughts, smart people have been trying this message for years and it's still true, and it's still in need of help. How do you trust someone you only interact with digitally? What do you need to learn about them to understand who they are and form a relationship? When does the group decide versus an individual? Are there realizeable technology solutions here (standards and protocols)? Which social and behavioral patterns need to grow and adapt?

Really it's all part of the fundamental change the Net is having on the world, that we're becoming that Big Small Town. As a species we've learned how to function in small social units for many millennia, and now we're learning how to apply those same intuitive rules to dynamically formed groups over new mediums. It's perhaps not that different than if human teleportation were possible and you could jump between any community in the world in an instant, how many rules would have to adapt to accommodate the pace of relationships and retain the fabric of any community?

I'm rambling, but that's ok, tis the season! Here's to a great 2006!

This isn't new news, but I haven't seen anyone make it very clear yet, so I will:

Content hosted on Google Base is exclusive, and not available to any other search engines!

I am absolutely flummoxed that Google, the company who's entire foundation and success is built on other's content, would do something so contrary as to become a walled garden. Seriously, the insolence of this act simply astonishes me, and I hope others. This is the company that owns the phrase "Don't Be Evil" and has the trust of the masses.

Now with Base they boldly make the statement "Help the world find your content." It sounds wonderful, another web hosting service and who can do it better than Google, right? Wrong, when any web tool other than a browser (such as another search engine) tries to access the content hosted on Google Base, they encounter this bit of protocol will disallow all use of the content to anyone other than Google:

http://base.google.com/robots.txt:
User-agent: *
...
Disallow: /base

Your content that you've entrusted to them to "host and make searchable online" is sitting squarely inside of Google Fort, armed with locked doors for their competition by blocking the very thing that made them a success, the open web.

A plea to Google: play fair.