At Hope I had a conversation with some folks about having a real time location based image server so that people who where near newsy events could take camera phone pictures and you could quickly find relevant pics based on their location and timeframe. This website is a very close approximation of what I was considering. Nice.

I would prefer if they did the whole planet though.

Mappr! Where It's At.

] Researchers at the University of Toronto have invented an
] infrared-sensitive material that's five times more
] efficient at turning the sun's power into electrical
] energy than current methods

[ Rad. They say something like 30% efficiency, so maybe something like 300 W/m^2 if I'm remembering right. Not bad. -k]

CTV.ca | New plastic can better convert solar energy

Code Con's content for 2005, which includes many projects of interest to folks here, including a reputation system, a web site recommender service, and an identity management framework.

CodeCon 2005

] Closer to Truth brings together leading scientists,
] scholars and artists to debate the fundamental issues of
] our times.

A websearch for fukuyama turned up this website. Looks interesting.

Closer To Truth

] Conservative commentator Armstrong Williams admits he was
] paid to provide favorable coverage of the No Child Left
] Behind Act and Education Secretary Rod Paige through a
] contract between the Department of Education and a public
] relations firm. NPR's David Folkenflik reports.

[ Listen to this. Particularly outstanding is the quote from CNN founding president Reese Schoenfeld : "A whore is a whore, and when you're paid to put out an opinion without announcing to the world that you've been paid, that's not only whoring, but pretending to virtue while you're doing it." Damn. -k]

Contract Tied to Coverage Promoting Administration

The new year is often time for reflection on where we
have been and where we are going. Sometimes that
reflection happens over a beer. Sometimes that reflection
happens with a gun to your head. In fact, both occurred
here at Industrial Memetics when Decius and Rattle forced
us, their loyal employees, to look back on 2004 and
consider the events that have shaped our lives.

No, Seriously, Fuck'n MemeStreams - Year in Graphs 2004

] Occasionally his Democratic questioners engage in long,
] indignant tirades, even though Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr.
] (D-Del.) announces early on that -- despite any
] appearance of hostility -- none of them actually plans to
] vote against Gonzales and they all know he will be
] confirmed.

The decent article about what its like to work in an environment where everyone is full of shit all of the time and they're just rhetorically careful enough about it that its hard to call them on it.

On the Hill, Where It's Hot . . . or Not (washingtonpost.com)

First, Eiron, thank you for raising this question. This is something that I have thought about at length. I appreciate your insight.

Second:
] the things I'm describing may not actually be the vision for
] this community. As it's not my project, I wouldn't presume to
] argue strongly for such a shift.

Do not let this dissuade you from engaging the conversation. A community cannot be owned. There is a delicate balance. I cannot simply take everyone's suggestions. Everyone always thinks their perspective is the right one. But I strongly encourage people to think about how this community should evolve. If I was as good as I wish I was this thing would be bigger then Google. I strongly encourage this kind of conversation, especially on the site.

] As it turns out, this stuff is all pretty hard, and completely
] different than the existing infrastructure. As a concept, only a bare
] germ at this stage,

Exactly. Thats why this dialog is useful. I don't know the answers here.

] i think there's merit, but I know there
] are other priorities right now, even if this was a direction
] for the future.

Thats true, but there is no reason this conversation cannot proceed while other priorities are pursued.

There are several perspectives on this, and each one presents problems.

1. There is a tremendous power involved in associating everything on this site by particular URLs, and one which has not really seen much application yet because of the scale of the site, and that is the discussion bookmarklet. MemeStreams associates a discussion with every url on the internet, and using the discuss bookmarklet you can jump right from any page to it's thread on memestreams. Once the site is sufficiently large this will be extremely powerful. Anytime you are reading an article and you want some more insight or critical commentary you'll be one click away from it. I think this is something the internet really needs that no one is doing right. I want to see it happen.

Having said all of that, you clearly need to have a way to put multiple URLs in a post and at least have them be clickable. Thats a basic, basic thing that I need to implement.

2. The topic system. The problem with topics is that there aren't enough of them and things need to be filed into multiple topics.

If we created enough topical granularity to be able to discuss something as specific as the tsunami the topic system would be unwieldy. Also, the topic system reflects a cultural bias. We have a 9/11 topic. We don't have a tsunami topic. If we lived in South East Asia our priorities would likely be reversed. We'd see 9/11 as a transient event and the tsunami as something that would impact our culture for years and require its own discussion space.

If we allow for things to be put in multiple topics this creates some significant user interface problems. Do you really want a way to file som... [ Read More (0.3k in body) ]

RE: Links, Memes, and Memestreams

] If there is something implausible in the idea that huge
] stretches of world history have been secretly coordinated
] from a market town just north of the M25 - well, maybe
] that's what they want you to think. The local newspaper,
] the Hertfordshire Mercury, certainly seems convinced:
] over the past few months it has published several
] intriguing stories quoting local Templars, who told its
] reporter of a secret network of tunnels under the town
] that was still in use by the order. "It reaches beyond
] well known central Hertford locations," one Templar said,
] "including the tourist office, the castle, Monsoon,
] Threshers, the post office, Bayley Hall, and the council
] offices." Treasures of "immense importance" were hidden
] there, it was claimed. Was the quest for the Holy Grail
] finally about to come to an end? More surprisingly still,
] was it about to come to an end underneath Monsoon on
] Market Place?

Weird.

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Hertford, home of the Holy Grail

] Of course librarians, teachers, and academics don't
] like the Wikipedia. It works without privilege, which is
] inimical to the way those professions operate.
]
] This is not some easily fixed cosmetic flaw, it is the
] Wikipedia's driving force. You can see the reactionary
] core of the academy playing out in the horror around
] Google digitizing books held at Harvard and the Library
] of Congress the NY Times published a number of
] letters by people insisting that real scholarship would
] still only be possible when done in real libraries.

Shirky's response is entertaining and well written and completely misses the point. There is an argument between internet people and people who like the way books smell about how to build information resources. There is a completely different discussion that says, we like wikipedia and believe in this model, but we acknowledge that its not perfected. How do you make wikipedia more useful then it is. Its more useful if I don't have to worry about the information being edited by a troll right before I check it. It would be more useful if the data in the articles was referenced. To discuss how to make it more useful is not to say it isn't useful now or that the internet and openness are bad. The thing has flaws and we ought to work on addressing them. If we're not willing to think critically about things that we are building that have become popular simply because we're afraid of conceding a point to the "other guys" everything we build is going to fail.

Many-to-Many: K5 Article on Wikipedia Anti-elitism