Christine

R&D Technologies for Data Visualization

Researchers Maneesh Agrawala and Fernanda Viegas walked through some amazing technologies that they've been cooking up in their labs for data visualization. As a data junkie, I was totally mesmerized. The Wikipedia analysis was an particularly fascinating visual interpretation of living content. (Disclosure note: Omidyar Network is an investor in Wikia, a related entity.)

Five Do's and Don'ts for the New News Media

Going through my FOO notes, I noticed that many conversations sparked ideas that were relevant  to participatory media. Here's a quirky list of do's and don'ts that reveal some of the best practices being used by others in the New News Media:

A Winning Business Plan: Bottlecap Porn

There was a terrific, tongue-in-cheek exercise at FOO Camp this weekend called "HalfBaked.com." Here's how this bit of entrepreneur improv works:

- Fill a grid with buzzwords
- Break up into teams
- Pick two words (2 minutes)
- Come up with a product, marketing plan, revenue model, logo, and tagline (5 minutes)
- Pitch to well-known VCs and entrepreneurs (5 minutes)

Growing Numbers of Women at FOO Camp

Environment: FOO Camp, hosted by Tim O'Reilly at the gorgeous O'Reilly Media campus in Sebastopol.

Open Data Standards Redux

The challenge of open data standards is working its way back to the forefront of attention. At FOO, a group of us sat down to discuss openly owned repositories of data, and how we could gather momentum around a summit-style dialogue to dissect the issue and start to work on a balanced solution. There is an unnerving variety of data that consumers should own, or at least have access to - school records, medical records, etc. It's not just about Flickr streams. We need both an open standard data format, and an open standard for how to get data.

Announcing the Birth of Chumby

Favorite hardware hacker Bunnie Huang gave this year's FOO Campers a sneak peek of the latest in cool gadgets: the chumby. The chumby is a low-cost, wifi-enabled information delivery device that's so appealing you'll want to keep one close.

Chumby's team of hardware hackers wanted this device to be fun and open, the anti-iPod. While iPod has a clean look and expensive molded plastic, it's not very accessible. The Chumby is meant to be personalized. If you're crafty, you can redesign it with a seam ripper; if you're a hacker, it's all open source inside.

One you've plugged in your chumby, it connects to your home network via wifi. Select "Trust the chumby" and it will autodiscover. Once you've registered online and picked from a selection of free widgets, the chumby displays a Flash stream of whatever you've configured - weather, news feeds, alarm clock, movies, pictures, stock tickers, etc. 

David Hornik Learns About Marketing from Syphilis

One of the fun sessions at FOO Camp today was David Hornik's discussion on viral marketing, subtitled "What can we learn from syphilis?" More specifically: What are the characteristics of good viruses in epidemiology?

Good Morning from FOO!

 

Forbes Says: "Don't Marry Career Women!"

Through an entirely roundabout path - an e-mail from a woman that I don't know, but who is also on the Google Group for my pal Chris O'Brien's kiddie blog - I received a link and rant on a new Forbes article by Michael Noer entitled "Don't Marry Career Women." Go ahead and read it. Here's an excerpt: "Guys: A word of advice. Marry pretty women or ugly ones. Short ones or tall ones. Blondes or brunettes. Just, whatever you do, don't marry a woman with a career."

Open Call for O'Reilly Media Telephony, Wireless, and Technology Presenters

There's been past chatter on the outreach limitations inherent to "insider" tech conferences. In an effort to help drive a diversity of voices, I'm reposting excerpt information from the open calls that I recently received from O'Reilly Media seeking both proposals and speakers for the ETech and ETel conferences. (Disclosure note: Omidyar Network is an investor in O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, a related entity, and I serve on its Technology Advisory Board.)

Caterina Fake and Meg Hourihan Share Flickr, Blogger Lore

Did you know that two of Web 2.0's biggest success stories - Flickr and Blogger - were never meant to be? Caterina Fake, co-founder of Flickr, and Meg Hourihan, co-founder of Pyra Labs and Blogger, shared tantalizing tales of hard work and serendipity with Marnie Webb of NetSquared at the recent BlogHer conference:

Burning Man Gets its Own Mashup

Beatmaps, an event listings mashup, just posted a neat Burning Man mashup. This tool combines Google satellite maps with Burning Man's schedule of events, a user-generated tagcloud, etc. Registered beatmaps users can add themselves, their camp/artwork/events, etc. and tag everything as they like. (Compare this to the official burning man calendar.) Ideally, this mashup is also sucking in data from existing sources, but it's hard to tell from the limited info at the beatmaps site, which is in beta.