Archive for Mar 2010

14 entries

10 Reasons You Should Attend Kynetx Impact

Wed Mar 31 09:59:00 2010

On April 27-28, we'll hold the second Kynetx Impact conference. The first, last November, was well attended, very fun, and people consistently told us that they learned a lot. Impact isn't just a conference about KRL (Kynetx Rule Language) and the cool things you can do with it--although you'll find plenty of that too--it's a conference about what we think of as the client-side revolution: a whole new way of Web programming that thousands of developers are discovering. So, with that intro, here are ten reasons you should come to Impact: Jon Udell - Jon Udell will be giving
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Natural Born Cyborgs

Mon Mar 29 16:38:00 2010

Years ago, I read a great book by Andy Clark called Natural Born Cyborgs. The thesis of the book is that humans are natural tool users and the current way that we use search engines, mobile phones, and other modern devices are no different. We naturally adapt our lives to using these new tools. Clark considers cell phones, PDAs, laptops, and Internet search engines as "prime, if entry-level, [examples of] cyborg technology". He says "the mind is just less and less in the head." In fact I regularly called my laptop my "exocortext." For a look at how far
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The Last Stack Overflow Podcast...For a While

Wed Mar 24 07:44:00 2010

Image by ern via Flickr Today I published Episode 86 of Stack Overflow. You may have heard that Joel is going to quit blogging. He also hinted that that would include podcasting. Episode 86 represents the last Stack Overflow podcast--at least in it's current form. Joel and Jeff are going to take a few weeks off and see if they can redefine the podcast. If you have specific suggestions for them, I'm sure they'd appreciate hearing your ideas. Meanwhile, I'm going to miss this podcast...a lot.
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CTO Breakfast and Podcamp This Friday

Tue Mar 23 10:17:00 2010

The CTO Breakfast this Friday will be held in conjunction with Podcamp SLC. Note that that means a venue change. The breakfast will start at 8am on Mar 26th at Neumont University, South Jordan, Utah (map). As always, we'll have a great group of folks and awesome teh conversation. When it's over, you can mosey on over to the Podcamp sessions and learn about blogging, social media, social networking, podcasting, video on the net, and digital media. Podcamp SLC costs $20 for the day. Be sure to register. The next CTO Breakfast will be held on April 29 (Thurs)
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Google, China, and Trust

Tue Mar 23 08:46:00 2010

Yesterday Google redirected google.cn to Google's Hong Kong site after a many month-long war of words between Google and the Chinese government. Google accused the Chinese government of industrial espionage and has been chaffing under the Chinese government's requirement for censorship. There's a lot of commentary about Google destroying their chances to compete in the world's fastest growing economy, but I want to focus on something else. Google was caught between what it thought was the right thing and it's desire--some would say need--to do business in China. Google chose the right thing. One of the
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Utah Caucus Meetings Tomorrow! Come Participate!

Mon Mar 22 09:44:00 2010

Statewide party caucuses for Republicans, Democrats and others will be held tomorrow, March 23, 2010 at 7pm. The election of a delegate is the first--and the most important--step in the partisan election process in Utah. The delegates elected in a precinct will hold the power to vote on behalf of the approximately 1250 voters in their precinct at the statewide party conventions in May. If enough citizens don't turn out, a few "special interest" people end up controlling the vote for delegates; if special interest people become the delegates, they won't represent the interests of the
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Twitter, Avatars, and Influence

Wed Mar 17 09:53:00 2010

People use Twitter for lots of different purposes. I use Twitter to keep up with friends, find new things on the 'Net that I wouldn't otherwise see, and to tell others what I'm thinking. Another word for that final purpose is "influence." To a certain extent almost everyone on Twitter is trying to use it to influence something--some more blatantly than others. If you've been on Twitter for any time you'll notice that people have different behaviors with respect to their avatars. Some put them up and never change them. Some put up their own face.
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Thinking About Cassandra

Tue Mar 16 16:39:00 2010

This week on the Technometria podcast, Scott and I interview Jonathan Ellis about the Cassandra Project. Cassandra is an open source distributed database management system used by Facebook, Twitter, and other sites. Cassandra is a distributed database that is designed for extreme scalability. Cassandra is one of the so-called "NOSQL" databases. That's something of a misnomer, because its not specifically SQL that they're lacking--although they are that--but relations. Like Amazon's Dynamo and Google's Bigtable (from which it draws its founding ideas), Cassandra is designed to solve the problems that many modern Web applications have for storing data. That's not
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Come to Kynetx Impact in April

Mon Mar 15 11:28:00 2010

On April 27-28, we'll hold the second Kynetx Impact conference. The first, last November, was well attended, very fun, and people consistently told us that they learned a lot. As I mentioned previously, Jon Udell will be the keynote speaker and I expect it to be a great talk. In addition to Jon's keynote, we'll be talking about client-side Web programming and why it's the next exciting place to work on the Internet. We've got a lot going on in preparation for this spring's Impact. There will be a number of big announcements from Kynetx and our partners about
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The Power of Pull

Wed Mar 10 08:11:00 2010

This week on the Technometria podcast, Scott and I talk to David Siegel, the author of The Power of Pull. David talked to me one or two times quite a while back about identity as he was researching this book, but I didn't really know what the book was about or why he cared about identity. In appreciation, he sent me a copy of the book when it came out and I left it sitting on my desk for a number of weeks before I picked it up. When I did, I was blown away. I'm certain that the
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Amazon Products in KRL: A New Distribution Model

Fri Mar 5 10:40:00 2010

The first Web service that Amazon put up, years ago, was the ECommerce API that allowed API access to Amazon's product information. That API has gone through several name changes and is now called the Product Advertising API. Thousands of people have used this API to add data about products--and the opportunity to buy them--to their Web sites. That's the problem, of course. You can use it on your Web site, but you can't conveniently use them in a browser extension to build client-side community apps because your Amazon developer keys would be exposed to the world. The most
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Using the .tel TLD for Managing Contacts

Wed Mar 3 14:47:00 2010

This week's Technometria podcast is with Henri Asseily, the CTO of Telnic. Telnic is the registry for the .tel top-level domain. The .tel domain is a little different than most domains you might run across. For one, you can't point it at a Web site (although you can get email through it using MX records). The registry controls the A records for the domain and they all point to a contact page. For example, here's my .tel domain: windley.tel. I, of course, control all this data using a Web page that they provide for that purpose. The nifty thing
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Who Owns Data About You?

Wed Mar 3 09:19:00 2010

On Saturday, I blogged about a bill before the Utah Senate that would allow law enforcement to use administrative subpoenas to get data about you from your ISP when they suspected you of crimes against children. This would be done without a warrant and without any real oversight (as currently drafted). This morning Rep. Brad Daw is testifying about his bill before the Senate Edcuation Committee (yeah, it's confusing). @sausagegrinder (a Daily Herald reporter) tweeted that Daw said: Daw: 4th amend doesn't apply to his bill. The subpoenas would be for information owned by a company, not property of
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Building Fourth Party Apps with Kynetx

Tue Mar 2 09:13:00 2010

Doc Searls uses the term "sewage pump" (I'm paraphrasing) to describe the modern advertising-based economy. Modern society has created the most efficient machine imaginable to push stuff at people whether they want it or not. I gave an example in this blog post about Novatel: they're treating Twitter as a way to push stuff at me instead of as a place to relate to me. A pump pushing sewage at you is a good metaphor for what's wrong with the marketplace we've constructed in the late 20th century. Doc has built the VRM project as a means of exploring
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