Wed, 30 Apr 2003 15:34:59 GMT

Circumcision does not dull sensitivity: study [Reuters Health eLine]

Thank Goodness. I would have loved to have seen the grant application for this work!

Wed, 30 Apr 2003 15:31:40 GMT

Hydra collaborative editor catching on. Writing on his ETech weblog on the O’Reilly Networks site, Robert Kaye digs into how Hydra, the collaborative text editor, works in a conference environment: The Hydra collaborative editor at work. [Mac Net Journal]

Kaye describes not only Hydra, but what it was like to be a new Mac user at ETCon. WHat a marvelous time it must have been. I’ve been using Macs since 1984 (I still have my 128K upstairs. I start it up and play Airborne – written by Jonathan Gay for Silicon Beach Software whenb he was still in High School – every so often). I was excited with Hydra. What it must have been like to become a part of the Mac community at ETCon and seeing the explosion of enthusiasm for Hydra. I hope it was not too overwhelming.

Wed, 30 Apr 2003 15:11:25 GMT

Scale Free Networks.

The May 2003 issue of Scientfic
American has an article on

Scale Free Networks.  The free information online doesn’t
do it justice.

This article explores such questions as what happens as new
actors come on board with respect to the
Six
Degrees of Kevin Bacon game?  Naïvely, one would
assume that eventually a seventh degree would be required. 
What happens in practice is that 
power
law effects kick in.  Most new actors end up being
supporting actors in a movie with a popular actor, and in the
process the popular actor gets more popular.

What are the implications?  Pretty profound. 

For decades the presumption has been that radio spectrum is
scarse and that organizations like the FCC are required to regulate
them.  Recently this
has
been questioned.  Perhaps adding stations increases
capacity.  Counter-intuitive, perhaps, but not impossible.

Now lets turn to the realm of people.  Clay Shirkey has
ruminated on the relationship between
Communities,
Audiences, and Scale.  What he says seems reasonable, but
the question remains:

What if Clay Shirkey is wrong?

[Sam Ruby]

This is a discussion that will only be answered by living through it. It may well be that Clay’s argument is absolutely right – humans cannot deal with a densely connected network due to natural constraints (we evolved to deal with no more than 150 connections). But can we develop tools to overcome this or will we develop communities that act like a pseudo-connected network? (fewer connections but enough to balance our limitations with the potential for information flow that comes from networks). By being 3-4 links from everyone rather than 1-2? Humans are nothing if not adaptable. Perhaps we will find some way to get around the 150 barrier or make the densely connected network appear to be no more than 150 people to our feeble brains?

Wed, 30 Apr 2003 14:58:59 GMT

Where did SARS come from? The odds say zoonosis. I frequently get comments on SARS Watch Org and via email, suspicious that the SARS virus was created by somebody, because how could it appear from thin air? The probable answer is explained in this interesting article from the Boston Globe, Crossing the species barrier, which gives has some good background for the lay person on zoonosis, or the common spread of diseases from animal to human. The article gives examples of the many diseases that have crossed over from animals. A sample: When… [SARS Watch Org]

The Boston Globe article has some good info. One of the lessons from Jared Diamond’s classic book, Guns, Germs and Steel, was its convincing proposition that many of our most common illnesses came from the domestication of animals (i.e. smallpox). Zoonosis is an easy route for viruses to hop to a new niche. Until our immune systems adapt, they can cause huge problems. Pandemics always look like they appear from nowhere. That is the power of exponential growth.

Wed, 30 Apr 2003 14:44:55 GMT

Hydra and iStorm. Hydra caused quite a stir at ETCon last week. I thought it very helpful in getting a group to capture thoughts together. iStorm is a similarly positioned product. I looked into it and here’s what I thought. [Windley's Enterprise Computing Weblog]

Some more thoughts on Hydra. I was excited to see that the group behind Hydra is looking to integrate it with iChat (if seamless, this could add some really useful aspects to both). Being able to maintain colors of the participants is probably the biggest request.

Wed, 30 Apr 2003 14:38:18 GMT

InfoSpace’s ousted CEO contests company’s `non-compete’ clause. BELLEVUE — If InfoSpace’s former chief executive officer is right, the non-compete agreements that many high-tech workers sign may be worthless. [Business]

Ohh. I just love a business cat fight.

Wed, 30 Apr 2003 14:28:23 GMT

Here come the Wi-Phones. Can you say killer app? I already have. But the equipment rollout from companies like Cisco, Telesym, NEC, and Vocera is happening even faster than I expected. [Werblog]

After hearing about using Wi-Fi to get Iraq’s phone service up again, the use of WI-Fi phones is intriguing. I wonder what sorts of telephone deals will be coming out. Should make T-Mobiles move into Wi-Fi at Starbucks a very prescient move.

Tue, 29 Apr 2003 21:29:26 GMT

The problem with being out of town is catching up. I’m almost there. Maybe by tomorrow.

Sat, 26 Apr 2003 00:07:56 GMT

Well, we got most of the Hydra problems dealt with. It still is in beta and I would assume that the creators got some really good feedback from the users here. Hydra really made this conference much better. There were a ton of meetings held simultaneously yet I could follow them by watching the Hydra documents. Note-taking at conferences was not an obvious use for Hydra but its ‘emergent’ properties really elevated it quickly to a major bit of social software.

Hydra hits the wall

Well, we found out what happens on this wireless network when EVERYONE joins a Hydra document at the same time. Everything was going fine until there were about 25 people all joined to the document. Then, we could all see the creator update his notes but anything added by anyone else was lost. Maybe it was the lag time of the network, perhaps it was some problems with ad-hoc networks that keep popping up, or maybe it is just the software. So, we essentially started over with a copied version and, as long as we stayed about 12 or less, we had no problems. Still some social conventions to work out. Lurkers could be a problem.

Google’s DNA

Check out Google today.

Fri, 25 Apr 2003 15:39:21 GMT

Another morning but now with Hydra, I can relax a little knowing that others will catch anything I miss. Trevor Smith and Eric Sinclair have taken the major roles of ‘creator’. We all look for them to start the ball rolling.

Fri, 25 Apr 2003 06:10:52 GMT

[Hack the Planet]

This sort of thing happened less and less as the group figured out some norms to deal with the collaborative environment. What Wes has here is part of what I would like to see. It should just take a click of a button to convert the Hydra text to html and publish it to a blog or wiki. If the annotators could also be included, that would be fine. this way others running a different operating system could benefit from the program’s power.

Fri, 25 Apr 2003 05:20:18 GMT

NetNewsWire and Spring Earn Top Awards in Inaugural Mac OS X Innovators Contest. NetNewsWire and Spring earn top two awards in the inaugural Mac OS X Innovators contest. Here’s the official announcement. [O'Reilly Network Articles]

Two great pieces of software and the envy of most other OSes.

Fri, 25 Apr 2003 04:39:47 GMT

Well, you saw no more notes from me about the meeting because I spent all the time using hydra. Someone would create the notes, we would all help write it (I especially loved adding links), we’d add our email addresses to the bottom and the creator would email us a finished copy. Very sweet and also very fun to watch. Others kept asking what I was running and spent some time downloading their own copies in order to participate. The coolest thing was being able to join a collaborative note being created in the room next door, at a meeting I could not be at simultaneously with the one I was in. It was like reading the closed-captioning of a TV show. Not as good as being there but almost as useful.