Category: General

Slashdot has a review of ” Interactive Storytelling: Techniques for 21st Century Fiction” by Andrew Glassner, who “takes a look at what we know about stories, what we know about games, how they work (or don’t work) together now, and how they might work together in the future. First, this is a book that everybody who wants to make compelling games should read. That said, however, it isn’t really a book you would read for fun — it’s more of a textbook. The first half of the text is a necessarily rather dry presentation of concepts: for example, nine pages on ‘Narrative Devices.’ Glassner uses copious examples from movies that you’ve probably seen and games that you’ve probably played, and the text is certainly an easy read and well written, but it’s still a very step-by-step presentation. You can’t hide the fact that you’re supposed to be learning something here. The second half of the book does open up a bit as he goes beyond just priming you on story and game theory.”

TNL.Net writes: “The modular by design approach is based on the simple concept of small modular components. In order to fully understand it, however, one must examine the actual components of this approach: standards, focus, flexibility, speed, communication, and stealth.” The concepts are applied to various areas in technology.

Wired has an article by David Weinberger on the challenge we will all face in organising the photos htat we will take with our digital cameras:

Digital cameras already capture critical data points at the moment the shutter clicks. Most models record – in the image file itself – not only the date and time a photo was taken but also the focal length, the aperture setting, and whether the flash fired. These tidbits can provide clues about whether the photo was taken indoors or out, during the day or at night, focusing on something close up or far away. Scanty metadata, but potentially helpful.

But why limit the possibilities to what today’s cameras can do? The image file format most cameras use includes fields for longitude and latitude, in anticipation of the day when global positioning systems are built in. That day could be soon. Cell phones already gather some positioning information, and by the end of 2005 all new cell phones in the US will be locatable to within 500 feet or so. Establish a Bluetooth wireless connection between phone and camera and the camera will know where it is. Web sites already exist that use GPS data to let you upload photos pegged to spots on maps, and a Stanford research project compares photos with shots of known locations, automatically annotating snaps with information about where they were taken.

Combine location data with a database that knows about places and public events and you can pinpoint pictures of Aunt Rose at the international volleyball semifinals. Link that with her personal calendar and you can differentiate between shots taken at the volleyball tournament and those shot at her 61st birthday beach party later the same day.

But there’s even more metadata waiting to be gathered without lifting a finger. Presumably the most important pictures are the ones viewed, printed, or emailed most often. When it comes to searching for photos, that information can play the same role as the number of links to a Web page in Google’s ranking algorithms.

Since the introduction of the Kodak Brownie more than 100 years ago, we’ve thought of photos as shiny paper rectangles stacked in shoe boxes or pasted to dusty albums, to be hauled out when we’re feeling sentimental. But the connected world in which we live suggests a different approach. Private snaps are migrating to the Web as well as to closed social networks such as Flickr, where they potentially belong as much to their subjects as the person wielding the camera. If your family members could browse through your photos whenever they wanted, you wouldn’t have to tag the photos featuring Aunt Rose, because she could do it herself. So could her children. Or crazy Uncle Fred, who has too much time on his hands.

And this may be the key to the future of photo management: Rather than locking pictures away, we’ll make them public. Technology will imbue our images with a broader, deeper sense of shared memory. Our ways of finding photos will change – and with them, our ways of remembering.

Adam Rifkin estimates the size of the personal web, and writes: “Personal Webs with recommender systems that take into account what I like to read and write, and what people I trust like to read and write, is the only way to make sure those 21 Gigabytes count.”

Yahoo’s launch of its personal search is interesting. Chris Sherman writes:

The new My Yahoo Search is well implemented and easy to use, but doesn’t offer compelling reasons to use it unless you’re looking for what amounts to an enhanced bookmark utility that’s tied to Yahoo search results. It’s great to see companies like Yahoo and Ask Jeeves taking baby steps toward true personalization of search results. And I fully expect to see more robust features and enhancements to personal search from both search engines, probably in the very near future.

But for now, my reaction is “that’s nice,” as I continue my daily use of personal web managers like search engine independent, industrial strength Furl.

[via Atanu] Hal Varian has an essay on “how I came to be a columnist, and how I go about writing the columns.”

My view is “Power corrupts, and Powerpoint corrupts absolutely.” I generally avoided Powerpoint unless I really needed it. The way I see it, Powerpoint is fine for presentation. But if you are just going to give a talk then you should do it without mechanical aids. I found that people paid a lot more attention to what I was saying when I just spoke.

The great thing about writing the Economic Scene column is that you can avoid Baker’s panic-if you can’t think of something to write about yourself, you can just write about someone else’s ideas.

This is a fantastic help, since there is no end of interesting economic material being written. Since essentially no one reads those papers-except for other economists-there is a vast reservoir of untapped material.

What I try to do is to take some current event-Social Security, or drug prices, or technology-and find some relevant work in economics. Sometimes it is recent work, sometimes several years old. And then I try to explain how this economic thinking casts light on the issues being debated.

It doesn’t always work like this. Sometimes I come across an interesting working paper or recent publication and I use that as the basis for the column.

Sometimes someone (usually a non-economist) will ask me about something and this will inspire me to write a column explaining the economists viewpoint.

And sometimes I even have an idea of my own.

[via Anish Sankhalia] Fast Company writes that “networks of amateurs are displacing the pros and spawning some of the greatest innovations.”

These far-flung developments have all been driven by Pro-Ams — committed, networked amateurs working to professional standards. Pro-Am workers, their networks and movements, will help reshape society in the next two decades.

The 20th century was marked by the rise of professionals in medicine, science, education, and politics. In one field after another, amateurs and their ramshackle organizations were driven out by people who knew what they were doing and had certificates to prove it. Now that historic shift seems to be reversing. Even as large corporations extend their reach, we’re witnessing the flowering of Pro-Am, bottom-up self-organization.

Rap, for one, started as do-it-yourself music among lower-income black men from distressed urban neighborhoods, recorded by artists on inexpensive equipment and distributed on handmade tapes by local labels. Yet within two decades, rap has become the dominant popular music across the world. In league with Pro-Am music distribution made possible by Napster and Kazaa, it has turned the entire record industry on its head.

Linux is the product of mass participatory innovation among thousands of Pro-Am technologists. Many of them program commercial software for a living but work on Linux in their spare time because the spirit of collaborative problem solving appeals so powerfully. Likewise, according to one estimate, 90% of the content in The Sims is created by a Pro-Am sector of The Sims ‘ playing community, a distributed, self-organizing group whose players are constantly training one another and innovating.

Paul Graham writes in an essay:

The fact is, despite all the nonsense we heard during the Bubble about the “new economy,” there was a core of truth. You need that to get a really big bubble: you need to have something solid at the center, so that even smart people are sucked in. (Isaac Newton and Jonathan Swift both lost money in the South Sea Bubble of 1720.)

Now the pendulum has swung the other way. Now anything that became fashionable during the Bubble is ipso facto unfashionable. But that’s a mistake– an even bigger mistake than believing what everyone was saying in 1999. Over the long term, what the Bubble got right will be more important than what it got wrong.

The hard part, if you want to win by making the best stuff, is the beginning. Eventually everyone will learn by word of mouth that you’re the best, but how do you survive to that point? And it is in this crucial stage that the Internet has the most effect. First, the Internet lets anyone find you at almost zero cost. Second, it dramatically speeds up the rate at which reputation spreads by word of mouth. Together these mean that in many fields the rule will be: Build it, and they will come. Make something great and put it online. That is a big change from the recipe for winning in the past century.

Technology Review presents its fourth class of 100 remarkable innovators under 35 who are transforming technologyand the world.

It would be interesting to prepare a list of Indians working in India who are doing the same. I am sure there is a lot of innovation happening in India, but it hasn’t bubbled up yet. Any suggestions?

WSJ has an article by Laura Landro on EMRs in the US context:

In New York’s Hudson Valley, more than 600,000 patients are blazing a trail with a new regional medical-information network that lets area hospitals, doctors, labs and pharmacies share medical records securely over the Internet.

The Taconic Health Information Network and Community project is one of the most ambitious efforts yet in a growing movement to establish large regional health-information networks around the country. While it may be a decade or more before Americans have a national system of electronic medical records — as promised this year by the Bush administration — more than 100 state and local groups are moving quickly to establish their own networks, securing seed money from federal agencies and nonprofit groups, and lining up local employers and health plans to offer financial incentives, including bonuses for doctors to participate.

The regional networks aim to get local providers to convert patients’ paper medical files to electronic records, and persuade doctors to exchange pertinent information with a patient’s other health-care providers. By using a single network, regional health groups say they can reduce medical mistakes, better track patients with chronic diseases such as diabetes, zip prescriptions electronically to pharmacies, and cut costs by eliminating duplicated lab tests and X-rays.

“The simple vision is that we want to see every American covered by one or more regional health-information organizations,” says David Brailer, who was appointed as the nation’s first health-information-technology coordinator this year. Regional networks are better suited to meet the needs of specific geographic populations, he says, and eventually, the regional networks can all be interconnected to form a national network that will enable officials to track health trends, report disease outbreaks and better identify public-health issues.

Tim Oren writes that “from an investor’s perspective, there’s the possibility that one of the major value chains in modern society – media and advertising – will be rearranged, at least in part. That makes an economic analysis of the issue rather interesting.”

Google’s business model is provocative in partially reassembling the bundle from the advertisers’ point of view. Through search related ads, bundling around declared interests rather than demographics can be achieved. Adsense goes further in attempting juxtaposition of ads with actual content on the same basis. I’m awaiting with interest the form that advertising will finally take on Google News. Google is leveraging cheap cycles and a lot of algorithms research against the bundling needs of advertisers, but largely leaving the readers to fend for themselves. But, it has the advantage of a clear business proposition.

RSS aggregating software and services are a provocative attempt to let the readers build their own bundles. This is impossible in the legacy media, and creates a sharp differentiation from the old style of bundling. The juxtaposition of citizens’ media (blog posts) with legacy media content ripped from its home site goes one step further in exploding the apparent value of the old bundle. Reader side aggregation can thus destroy old value, but hasn’t so far shown an ability to extract serious revenue from readers.

Technorati is another cut. It’s not a bundling solution at all. Instead it seeks to reduce the ‘search costs’ associated with following threads of interesting discussion across the Web. If the transaction costs of retrieving individual information bits is reduced, the need and attraction of bundling is reduced. But, there’s also the problem of a lacking business case. Perhaps that can be found from the advertisers’ side. If promotion to demographic or general interest bundles is giving way to selling by influence, then tracking the conversation becomes of value. Technorati appears to be a radical unbundling hypothesis on both the reader and advertiser sides.