 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Post-event dinner, Ming's, Mountain View CA Takeaway observation #1: no women at the table. This was an overwhelmingly male, and largely young crowd, and the data sources being mashed up reflected that. (There were a few greybeards but not many.) Conclusion from that is that at least 50% of the mashups that you might want to build, and maybe 80%+, haven't even been considered yet. The demographic that's writing the code is scratching their own itches, and none of the tools have empowered the moms groups or the knitting circles or the senior centers or the parents groups or the PTOs or the ... to build their own, at least not yet. We're seeing repeated patterns in what sorts of applications get built this way, and how they look, and what they do. Tools to make building the easy applications quickly are getting better but are still too messy and make the results look like magic and not just art. Data, data, data, data, data, then code. Post-event party, Googleplex You have to sign an NDA at the door to get in, but the receptionist does not have a paper copy of the clickthrough agreement for you to keep. What's up with that? Silicon Valley excess is cyclical, and aside from a few exercise machines and a few more curving walls I didn't see anything so much different in workplace architecture and employee amenities from 1999 era Cisco. The Google food is better than Cafe Beige ever was. All of the photos of Google employees on display were pictures of young people. Wrap-up plenary, the "winners" 1. winner Podbop, events+mp3 podcast mashup. Listen to bands who will be playing in your home town. Based in San Diego. 2. winner Chicago Crime Map. Very detailed crime information in Chicago, down to the local level 3. consolation prize. FlySpy. Best fare matcher puts 50000 prices onto one page so you can price out the market 30 days out. Based in Minneapolis. Conclusion: Silicon Valley is not the center of the world for mashups; people with local or detailed data anywhere can make a hell of a good system without having to be here. (But it helps to be here to get 300 people to see your stuff at once.) Session: Firefox roadmap Lots of Microsofties in the room grilling the Mozilla guy about what was coming next. New software for Windows Mobile phones, something like Minimo (sp? correct me here) which is a tiny Mozilla on the phone. It's in version something like 0.0013, but it is shipping. I asked about Minimo on the regular desktop, either for development or just having something different, somewhere there's some kind of emulator. New XUL Runner architecture, making a clean line between library and application, so that you can build smaller apps in XUL (single purpose tools, widgety kinds of things, e.g.) that don't require compiling in the whole mess because you already have Firefox installed. Some kind of complicated and hard to understand versioning roadmap which I didn't really understand (see post-lunch stupor below). Software win: Developers toolbar which has a piece that lets you edit the CSS on a page live and see it rerender keystroke by keystroke. Documentation lose: All the cool Firefox features that you can only learn about either by being an obsessive browser geek or by looking over the shoulder of someone who is doing intense development. There's room for a moderately technical tip-of-the-day blog showing off neat stuff or screencasting little time saving features. Post-lunch stupor, and not enough power outlets. First citation of the world "laptop" Google Book Search - Budget of the United States Government 1971 ?fox, p 164. Found in Google Book Search, and I'm pretty sure the book is in the government documents collection of the University of Michigan libraries. I'm just getting a partial page. Ah, but it's not right - GBS says the document is from 1971, but it's really from 1996 - I filed a bug report w/Google. Lunch Steamed edamame and ginger tofu from the Google catering team. Nice. Thanks to Enoch, lunch with Dave Winer. Notes later. Audio recording mashup. We took a combination of Larry Magid's microphone, my USB DSP adapter from my Plantronics headset, and Enoch Choi's OQO handheld to demonstrate that you could build a very small complete recording and podcast setup. It was a nice hack. Speed geeking notes. I might link later. Podbop. Didn't go. Nice idea. Needs data. Rrove geobookmark. Didn't go. Nice idea. Needs data. Mapbuilder. Sounded great, didn't go. Universal Submit from EVDB. One input box syndicates events to 6 sites. Nice. Traincheck. Email auto-responder to get train schedules in SFO, DC. Miffy microformat bookmarklet. Didn't go. Chicago Crime map. Very good data, awesome information architecture. ++++ Weatherbank. Weather data + maps. 48104 coverage was about the same as Weather Underground, and so I probably won't care to switch. Attendr. Build a map for your campers. I'll use this for Library Camp. Mozes. Didn't get it, didn't go. Back at Mashup Camp for the morning session The software win of yesterday was Desktop Manager, a virtual desktop for OS X. The Google Earth guy was running it and I saw a "wow" moment, so I installed it last night. I set up the hot keys so that smash-left arrow and smash-right arrow rotate windows. The morning's session is "speed geeking", with 30-odd people giving their 5-10 minute demos on what they are up to. 21 maps for conferences; 19 weatherbank weather+google earth mashup; 13 traincheck real time transit data; 14 miffy microformat editor; 10 mapbuilder.net; 6 podbop. Rohit Khare is looking for Caltrans accident data to do a "smashup". Rohit, look to connect to David Kingery, kingery@pbworld.com. Sleep There's unread mail and unanswered mail but it's so late it will just have to wait. Things to look at Library Thing, as a possible infrastructure for friends of the library book shop superquick cataloging. the Reuters guy at Mashup Camp (ooh, I am bad with names) who was on the lookout for a connection for someone at the British Library. |
Last modified: Wednesday, February 22, 2006 at 2:34 PM.
Tech resources |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
