Seb's Open Research

Tuesday, December 16, 2003

Caution - names dropping below :-) Back from a short trip to San Francisco. There's an amazing concentration of interesting people there. Among others I got to meet and chat with Marc Canter (left), Eugene Eric Kim, and Jay "Santa" Cross. Many thanks to Jay and Internet Archivist / Bitizen Gordon Mohr (right) for showing me around! SF is indeed a very nice city, especially when your hometown is three feet deep in snow. If you go there for the first time, don't miss the view from twin peaks. If you wanted to see many bloggers all in one place last Sunday, the 1-year anniversary party of Creative Commons was probably the best place to go. Most of "Joi's cool SF friends" were indeed there... Off the top of my head, I remember seeing Joi Ito, Cory Doctorow, danah boyd, Matt Haughey, Wendy Seltzer, Gordon Mohr, Kevin Burton, Chris Lydon, Dan Gillmor, Rebecca Blood, Anil Dash, and obviously Larry Lessig. Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle and Magnatune founder John Buckman and were there too. The short movie Reticulum Rex (7 Mb, Flash) was unveiled that night. It's a well-crafted animation which recaps the good things that happened with CC over the last year. Short story: it's doing extremely well. Too bad I had to leave early to catch a plane, only to get stranded in Toronto for a day and a half because of bad weather in Atlantic Canada... looking forward to coming back! What do you think? []  links to this post    1:00:19 PM   LiveJournal opens up There go the codes. I wonder if the growth curve will kink back up. LiveJournal founder Brad Fitzpatrick: We're just going to ditch invite codes altogether. Free users will be able to join without an invite code, and without a 30 day expiration. For the users who value their invite code collection, we'll let you redeem them for paid time, either for yourself or friends. (the exact exchange rate hasn't yet been decided, but we'll try and be generous). I used to have an invite code but had given it away. I'm now user #1594665 (yes, unique, just like everyone else!). I might use that journal for stuff that would add undue noise to this blog. What do you think? []  links to this post    12:07:10 PM   Wiki travel guide Hadn't yet linked to Wikitravel, the travel guide that was inspired by Wikipedia and got started this summer. Very nicely done - beats H2G2's clunkiness any day. Content is Creative Commons-licensed. Here's San Francisco. And here's the page for New Brunswick. Next thing, they should stick GeoURLs onto each city page. What do you think? []  links to this post    11:35:33 AM   Movie review query engine Hundreds of thousands of links to movie reviews can be found here. Here's a list of the numerous sources that the engine indexes. I wonder how it collects and indexes the data. What do you think? []  links to this post    11:20:13 AM   Father and son Discovered two very interesting-looking blogs that got started this last fall. Mayer Spivack's blog, Arts and Minds, offers reflections on creativity and cognition. In particular I recommend Six Stages In The Life Cycle Of Communication Channels. I think Stage 3 - order and community-building - is now beginning in the blogosphere. Mayer's son, Nova Spivack, writes about microcontent and the emergence of what he calls the Metaweb - which seems quite close to what I've been calling structured blogging. Never mind the bold-over-bold typeface - this is potent stuff. What do you think? []  links to this post    11:16:02 AM   Where do you sit? The Global Rich List website tells you how many people on the planet earn less (or more) than you. Here's how they compute it. What do you think? []  links to this post    10:35:58 AM   Weblogs and Google rank Lee LeFever shares observations on how his blog helped him get great Google ranking for a number of terms. His two tips: (1) Get linked by writing valuable content; (2) Pay attention to your weblog's structure. Link text and page titles matter. Elwyn Jenkins has thought and written quite extensively about this over the last year, too. See e.g. this recent post on "extended Google niches". What do you think? []  links to this post    10:05:53 AM

Copyleft 2006 Sebastien Paquet. Last update: 4/22/2006; 12:13:30 PM. This theme is based on the SoundWaves (blue) Manila theme.