Tuesday, April 29, 2008

BUG and Fire at Maker Faire 2008


BUG in Hong Kong magazine
Originally uploaded by offender
This weekend is going to be a geekfest delight at the San Mateo fare grounds (near the horse track) as Make Magazine's Maker Faire rolls back into town. Last year I visited it with jetlag from Australia, but this year I am taking it all in!

Be on the lookout for my friend Christian's Ristow's crushing artwork Subjugator and Manipulatrix and Lance's Greathouse's fire machines. They will warm you upon a crisp Bay area night!

But that's not the only reason for this post. My buddies at BUG labs asked me to write a bit about what I thought of their platform as a tool for inventors like myself. The essence is that I think the BUG is going to be an amazing tool for inventors - and think it has a huge future in the "long tail" with customized consumer devices. You can read my opinions at http://www.bugblogger.com/2008/04/dip-then-dive-i.html online.

With that, I will let you read more online and see you at the Maker Faire!

Monday, April 28, 2008

2008 O'Reilly Web2.0 Stories Part I


Web2.0 Day 1
Originally uploaded by gadget.
Ok, so I'm a new tech guy in an old media (dead trees and analog broadcast) world. Until now, ya see. Last week was pivotal for me. A magazine that I normally write for in print emailed me right before the W2E event and asked me to blog on it. Coolio I think (but that means I need to leave the parties at a decent hour to edit) and I neglected to remember this: when you are used to long lead times in print and lots of back-and-forth conversations with an editor on "what your worlds meant" versus blog posts which need to be up quickly and succinctly.

That on top of a content management system that was trashing (removing/deleting/zero-daying?) my stories made things a little tricky, but alas that dilemma is being worked on by coders much smarter than myself.

Here's a quick rundown of the first bit that are posted:

Tim O'Reilly, conference organizer does a "Radar" event at most of his events - they are a favorite of mine since he has a bunch of Alpha-geeks (myself included-yeah!) that he watches to see what we are hacking on. This lead to the creation of Make Magazine (I'm lucky enough to be a founding contributor) and Foo camp in 2003. Check out what I caught from his speech here: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,2286997,00.asp

The Chairwoman of Mozilla foundation, creators of Firefox, Micthell Baker had mobile browsing on her mind. Good timing on this one as iPhone's WebKit and Nokia platforms are going to go head to head with advanced and high-speed capabilities as the Treo works its way out of pockets. I still have another year contract left on my 755p. Read about here vision for the browser here:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,2287824,00.asp

MySpace VP Steve Peerman says that we can learn from our users (how Web2.0 of him!) by giving them advanced looks at interfaces or features and actually (gasp!) take their criticism. Find out if you want to have Tom as your friend again (you did delete him right?) by reading here: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,2287877,00.asp

Wrapping up this overview post is a story from Google's Matt Cutts, who was talking about Spam, no not the food or what ends up in your email in-box (despite GMail's bad ass filters) but comment and web page spam. Solutions for this double yickyness can be found here: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,2287888,00.asp

More to come as their content management system at PC Magazine dawt com gets corrected!