TED does it again. Check out this amazing demo that was shown at the TED Conference (Technology, Entertainment, & Design) in Monterey, CA.
Using photos of oft-snapped subjects (like Notre Dame) scraped from around the Web, Photosynth (based on Seadragon technology) creates breathtaking multidimensional spaces with zoom and navigation features that outstrip all expectation. Its architect, Blaise Aguera y Arcas, shows it off in this standing-ovation demo. Curious about that speck in corner? Dive into a freefall and watch as the speck becomes a gargoyle. With an unpleasant grimace. And an ant-sized chip in its lower left molar. "Perhaps the most amazing demo I’ve seen this year," wrote Ethan Zuckerman, after TED2007. Indeed, Photosynth might utterly transform the way we manipulate and experience digital images.
Blaise Aguera y Arcas is an architect at Microsoft Live Labs, architect of Seadragon, and the co-creator of Photosynth, a monumental piece of software capable of assembling static photos into a synergy of zoomable, navigatable spaces.
One of the phrases that keeps resonating from Blaise’s presentation is how much your photo is enriched by being part of this collective memory. Your photo, when grouped with these others becomes an emergent entity which is greater than the sum of its parts. The last half of the presentation demonstrates this so well as Blaise shows individual photos working together to make an amazing image of Notre Dame. Cellphone photos, SLR photos, even a poster is all enriched with this collective memory of photos.
Thanks to Matt Potocnik for sending me the link on this one.
In 1984, John Gage, from Sun Microsystems, coined the phrase "The Network is the Computer" to describe the emerging world of distributed computing. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gage) This was only three years after the stand-alone, non-networked PC had been introduced to the workplace, and most people dismissed John’s idea. They couldn’t comprehend what he was talking about. To them the computer was the new beige 386 computer sitting on their desk running Windows.
Now, over twenty years later, we are starting to understand what these five words really mean.
A few years ago Tim O’Reilly the O’Reilly book publisher coined the term Web 2.0. Below is a memory map created during the first FOO camp describing this "new" approach to the Web that reflects John Gage’s statement from 1984. (The FOO Camps are invitation only, no plan, tents on the lawn, geek fest to help O’Reilly find out what’s on the radar. The name comes from the common use of the word "foo" and "bar" traditionally used by programmers to designate an example variable name.)
Figure 2 – "meme map" of Web 2.0 that was developed at a brainstorming session during FOO Camp, a conference at O’Reilly Media
(http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html#mememap)
Web 2.0 utilizes AJAX making the difference between client and server virtually transparent. Instead of the old-fashioned click-and-wait as the client requested a web page from the server, mouse moves and clicks give immediate results and making the user think that everything is happening on his or her computer. (Google maps was the break through application of this type allowing people to "dragging" the map to see a new view instead of clicking on it and waiting for a new view to arrive from the server.)
Web 2.0 applications such as You Tube, MySpace, Wikipedia, del.icio.us, and Flickr encourage sharing and collaboration of all types of content. The user becomes king of the content. Instead of being fed pages, users create the content of a site. Instead of simply running programs or viewing web pages people are participating in a collective intelligence.
Instead of reading static pages we are interacting with each other on a global basis. Communications with people around the world are possible through IM (Instant Messaging), emails, postings, and web discussions. Instead of a private list of favorites you can now create a public list of annotated favorites with de.licio.us. Suddenly, a list of bookmarks becomes a fine-tuned search engine showing the best pages by keyword saved, shared, and annotated by everyone in the deli.cio.us world.
Instead of a Word document held captive by your word processor, you can now write collaborative documents on line using Google Documents & Spreadsheets. For example, I use Google Docs for committee meetings giving everyone the chance to add to the agenda as well as to view minutes and efficiently create collaborative documents instead of clumsy email attachments.
In the last module of my Web III (XML) course I discuss the phenomenon of emergence, a part of System Theory. Emergence demonstrates how complicated systems can be created from a series of relatively simple interactions. Examples include ant colonies that change personalities over a thirty-year period even though none of the individual ants live more than a year and there is no central leader ant (the queen’s only purpose is to lay eggs, she does not direct the colony). Or slime mold made of millions of individual spores. This mold forms when conditions are conducive and can "crawl" through a maze to find food, yet none of the spores has any brains and none of the cells act as a leader or catalyst. (These and many other examples are highlighted in an excellent book named Emergence by Steven Johnson.)
Our networked world and the Web in particular demonstrates the concept of emergence. Millions of connections are making a new, emergent entity. We are no longer simply interacting with the computer sitting on our lap. Now we are responding to the Web itself, the result of millions of seemingly insignificant additions from people (and computers) around the globe. The Network is truly the computer just as every web page, blog entry, forum question and answer, and You Tube video (and resulting comments) makes us part of its existence. To represent this concept Dr. Mike Wesch, an anthropology professor at Kansas State University put together the video entitled: Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us. He posted it on You Tube where it became one of the most popular videos in 2007.
The network is the computer and the computer is Us.
Everyone likes free books. Here is an excellent resource being organized by Globaltext.org .
Here’s a summary from their web site:
Through what he’s dubbed, “The Global Text Project,” Rick Watson and an international team of professors aim to create a free library of 1,000 electronic textbooks covering subjects typically encountered during the first two years of college. A prototype text is already complete, and work is underway on the first book in the series.
The prototype book was created in 2004 because Watson couldn’t find a comprehensive textbook for a graduate level XML programming class he was teaching. Each student was assigned to write chapter, and Watson served as editor-in-chief. The book, “XML: Managing Data Exchange” (http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/XML), turned out so well that it is still used in classes at UGA today. Each class that uses the text makes improvements on it, leaving it in better condition than they found it.
I looked through the XML text as well as the Java text and they both are an excellent resource for my class.
It’s interesting. Last semester I had my Web III (XML) class start a Wiki as part of the learning process. The idea was to do exactly what wikibooks is doing, although I didn’t know about wikibooks back then. I was disappointed when the students simply posted information that they copied from other sources on the Web in order to complete the assignment each week. I deleted the whole thing over the summer and decided not to pursue it.
Now I’m thinking of resurrecting this project. We could focus on a specific topic and all work together using a private wiki (a wiki is a web page where a group of people can all edit the pages – wikipedia is the most famous of these.) At the end of the semester we could submit the chapter to wikibooks.
Meanwhile, you don’t have to be in a third-world country to take advantage of these textbooks. Go out and find your favorite topics and bookmark them for reference.
Thanks to Tom Edwards for sending me the link about this.
Technorati : wikibooks reference ebook globaltext
Del.icio.us : wikibooks reference ebook globaltext
Ice Rocket : wikibooks reference ebook globaltext
Zooomr : wikibooks reference ebook globaltext
I’ll be re-designing the CCI website in a few weeks and received an email from the director asking if I could create an on-line calendar that they can use as a master scheduler for the employees.
I did a quick web search and came up with WebCalendar out on SourceForge which looks exactly what they are looking for.
Going through the process made me very aware of how much the Web is being used as a business tool and no longer as simply an on-line color catalog. They aren’t as interested in publishing information about the organization as they are in offering their employees tools to make everyone’s job easier.
We will use the calendar to display upcoming events for anyone to use on the Web. But, more importantly to the director of CCI is a “hidden” calendar for the employees so they will know when he is in the office and so they can schedule staff. These calendars will be accessible using user IDs and passwords and will be maintained by the employees at CCI, not myself.
Notice that I didn’t start writing my own code to do this. Instead I went out and did a search for “PHP group calendar” to see what was available as open-source. I’ll be able to include this multi-purpose tool in a few hours instead of weeks or months. Along the way I may create a few Flash tutorials for the CCI staff which I’ll give to the WebCalendar project as a resource for other people using this software.
This is a temporary posting for all my Web Students.
There’s a free 2-hour seminar in Bloomington covering AJAX. This is sponsored by Intertech. You can register at http://intertech.com/REGISTER
AJAX is the JavaScript tools that are being used on web sites such as Google Earth where you have the smooth scrolling. Using AJAX smoothes out the user experience because you don’t have the pauses every time you click on a web page.
This is being held at Microsoft at 8300 Norman Center Drive, Suite 950
Bloomington, MN Which I could go but I have other plans for that day that I can’t change.
Post a response if you attend. I’d love to hear what you learned.
While doing a little research to a question from my Web Programming I course (What were the other names Tim Berners-Lee had considered for the Web? The answer is here – look in 1990, the year the Web was invented.) I came across this poignant quote that Tim Berners-Lee had included at the bottom of his FAQ for Children:
When asked if the Web was a good or bad idea, Tim Berners-Lee writes:
Here is my hope.
The Web is a tool for communicating.
With the Web, you can find out what other people mean. You can find out where they are coming from.
The Web can help people understand each other.
Think about most of the bad things that have happened between people in your life. Maybe most of them come down to one person not understanding another. Even wars.
Let’s use the web to create neat new exciting things.
Let’s use the Web to help people understand each other.
–http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/Kids
Welcome to Web Explorations – showing pieces of the journey through the ever-changing landscape of the technologies of the Web. I’m Peter Johnson, and I’ll be your host.
Interested in taking courses in Web Programming? You can find out more on our web site at http://southcentral.edu/cc
