Hmmmm... SXSW

Had a great tweetup the other night at John Harvards in Harvard Sq, Cambridge. Met some creative, intelligent people in the social media sector, and even ran into a couple people I met at PodCamp Boston.

Amy Greenlaw aka girlgamy who I met at Podcamp was there and told me about an inteeresting panel that she is trying to get set up at SXSW 2009 about how social media impacts todays politics. This is something I am naturally interested in since my web start-up project Tomorrowish will have a major portion devoted to political promises and the ever constant of predictions of pundits. I signed up to leave a comment on the SXSW board specifically to add my support for the panel and I am seriously considering going to SXSW for the first time.

My 'opinion cloud', or oops I think I just coined a phrase.

I am in the middle of about half a dozen big projects at the moment and I can not concentrate on any of them.  So I thought I would get a little blog writing in, and maybe get my brain back on track. 

About Three weeks ago I was in Boston to take part in an interview with some marketing types that are working for The Science Channel.  They found me through my meetup.com profile where I guess the meetings I go to are sufficiently geeky as to blair loud and clear to anyone interested that I am someone who is likely to watch science television.  Lo, their assessment was dead on, and I am as predictable as I feared. 

Anyway, they had me come into the Boston and sat me down on a nice couch in the Ritz Carlton and asked me what would I do if I could remake The Science Channel.  I rubbed my hands together and for the next hour and a half brain dumped all kinds of ideas about science and tech television.  What I liked, teeny tiny detailed, statistically accurate,  fiddly programming.  What I hated, showing off the latest gun, without going into the engineering of it, or the Man vs Wild fiasco, with him getting a proper camp site and three square everyday. 

In the middle of all this I mentioned that the more REAL they made the science, the more believable they made the programming, no matter how geeky and seemingly impossible it would be for anyone to stay interested in the topic, the more props they would get from the internet sites I frequented.  When he asked for which sites, I casually said, "you know my 'opinion cloud', Digg.com, Slashdot.org, Space.com, various blogs, some personal online groups I am part of like Gweep.net, and my Facebook.com friends and meetup.com groups. 

His face twisted into this really neat comical mask, like he was tasting some very strongly flavored exotic fruit he wasn't sure he liked or not, but he was sure other people would like.  "Your 'opinion cloud' hmm? and should we be trying to create our own opinion clouds to get people interested in The Science Channel?" 

"Oh no, no!" I said "Just make super detailed really scientific programming, and not the little technology montage programs they have out there now, and they the opinion cloud will naturally drift over to your programming faster than you think."

Now the fun thing here is i thought up the phrase that moment just trying to explain all the places I get interested in 'some new thing' and the guy kept asking questions about opinion clouds instead of The Science Channel.  I think it really got his brain working.

So, if in a few months you see some marketing for the next great opinion cloud, you know where the word came from.

Blogged with Flock

Hi! I'm testing Jott...

Hi! I'm testing Jott sent into my Polymathmatics Blog for fun. We'll see if it works, I have no idea. And I have no idea to even [...] as a published or just as a draft. Well, will be [...] to you. There's a bunch of speakers in the background and I'm using my bluetooth headphones. [Poor Audio Quality, Please Listen] listen

Powered by Jott

Updated:
I am leaving the above as it came in from Jott just to show how it did. I was not trying to speak loudly anymore than I would to someone I was talking to on the phone. I don't know if I will use this for much, but it is nice to have. It certainly is a good fast way to make a quick draft of an idea, but it requires me to go in a clean up my common ticks of speech and any mis-transcribed sections.

I've got too many hacks

iPhone Hacks: Running out of Application space on your iPhone or touch? - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

I finally jailbroke, jailbreaked  (what is the past tense of jailbreak?) my iPhone a bit ago and after playing around with all the hacks out there, I seem to be running up against the ~300MB limit for files in the user directory.  I found this explanation on TUAW but have only done half of it.  It looks straight forward enough, I just need to ssh into my iPhone from my computer because typing in unix command lines on the virtual keyboard is WAY too annoying to do anything more than a few lines long.

Blogged with Flock

A moment away from work...or securing iPhone WIFI over EDGE

I have been plugging away at some rather dull CSS issues and my mind kept wandering to the hacks on my iPhone. I am in a coffee shop just down the street from my place, and they have open WIFI.

I kept thinking about the new installed apps on my iPhone and how it would be nice to just grab whatever open WIFI signal that was around without worry. Then I realized there are two radios on the phone. The EDGE data connection can act as a low bandwidth channel to send encryption data to any site, and the WIFI can send content data. The WIFI connection can connect to the main site with a suffix from the phone number. The encryption can be updated in real time say over an SMS message. So the only thing that gets sent over the clear would be the web address and that could be scrambled with a VPN like middle man server.

I did a quick search and it doesn't look like anyone is doing this yet. The programming is beyond my kung-fu but I would love to feel comfortable using open WIFI hotspots as well as the ones I have to pay for the encryption.

Evolution and Wisdom of Crowds

I found this article by way of Slashdot and I love the idea.

Evolution and Wisdom of Crowds: "Conventional wisdom says that the primary reason why so many people do not accept Darwin's theory of evolution is that they find it threatening to their religious beliefs. There is no question that religion is a big part of the reason behind the large number of people who reject evolution. But I am convinced that just as often, the cause and effect is reversed: people hold onto their fundamentalist religious beliefs because evolution by natural selection -- the strongest argument against an Old Testament-type creator -- is so counter-intuitive to so many."

This has the same flavor of the reason people find thinking out of the box to be unprofitable. The key ideas are both about starting at Knowledge point (A) and trying to get to Solution point (Z). Most people try to just barrel through the first step then the next BCD...until they find their solution. Instead taking a step back and asking what alphabet of solutions you could be dealing with lets you easily eliminate huge numbers of wrong steps. I will have to see if I can come up with an easy explanation that I can use this technique with in regards to Tomorrowish when I am explaining it to people.

Fwd: Iphone posting

So here is my first post from my new iPhone.  It is also my first meal at the new "Natick Collection" (aka natick
Mall) with quite a few new expensive stores.

The Met Bar here has a good burger, even if a bit small, it is tasty.  Unfortunatly for me they still are not stocked with any beer other than Bud.

The iPhone typing is working quite well and the mall has several different free wifi networks.  Once I logged onto the network here the speed has been good, and videos even downloaded quickly.

So far I am loving the iPhone and a big thank you goes to my family who chipped in together to get it for me since I really am enjoying it a lot


Sent from my iPhone