Should I use Disqus

So there is this neat commenting service that I think I can set up to be used here instead of normal Blogger comments. It kind of socialises comments but mostly does things that I have not bothered to read about yet. So my query today is; would any of my millions of readers be interested in (or problemed by) me changing to this service. Also, would any of you like to do a match (I change my comments over and you do too so we grow the network together)

I think it looks like an okay service. Please tell what yawl reckon.

The image is obviously not related to Disqus and actually comes from the EOL. I just thought it looked like a cute little creature. I started modelling it the other day but modo crashed. Perhaps I will do it again later. (I really like the EOL but they seriously should get their act together. There is a lot of good data on the subjects they work on but they seem not to be procuring it or linking to it much. They also have a bit of funding which to me seems like it is not being used)

Planning to Travel Around the World and Using the Google Visualisation API

So I am going to France this summer then I thought it would be nice to go overland to Korea and then to China before coming home. Here I have started to plan my movements but I have not yet checked spelling. I have also used the google data API to render this in an interactive timeline. I think it is still linked to the online data I am editing so it may change without notice.

It was not hard to use but it did take a little while to get it to work. I wish I could pipe in other data sets or something. Perhaps I can... I will see what I can do. 

Update: The timeline has stopped working for anyone now so I am going to not bother fixing it until I know some more details about my trip. The API is good but seems to be crufty and have some serious reliability issues at the moment.

Modo 302 Gotzd

Last night I finally got Modo 302. It is quite nice though I really have not used that many of the new features yet. Perhaps there will be more on that later. In any case I did some network render tests with an old model. Here is a pic. 

The lights are not done at all so please ignore them. 

Network rendering in Modo is fine but it seems to me that it can not set up radiance cashing as a network task. I think this is about as large of a shortcoming as you can get when doing something like this. Perhaps I just don't know how to do it yet.

Now I am working on a fish.

Search to Activity

This is the idea that instead of URLS one could just type something like Mark, and a bunch of potions would pop up. These options would include things like, contact methods (email, im, phone), sites, feeds, projects etc.. I think this is most interesting because right now there are a lot of good solutions that seem to stay independent. For instance, if I type something into Google I will find a lot of things. If I type something into Address Book I may find some things, come things I want but perhaps some of the things I want will not yet be back in Address book. Similarly, if I wanted to email someone rather fast I would essentially first have to create a new email. If I wanted to instead of emailing them look at their LinkedIn page I would have to either know their LinkedIn URL or first search or go to my contacts list in LinkedIn. 

My argument is that all this data, like the URLs of a bunch of my friends LinkedIn pages, and their email addresses and their websites and their blogs are all stored in places that are accessible already (many are stored simply in the browsers URL auto complete. So, there should be a thing that checks who a page or account is about and then associates them with it. So if i start typing there name in or a service in I get either a semantically useful list of their sites or a list of people I know using that service respectively. Just to give a completely obvious example, when I type Will (someone I studied with) in the right place I should see an option to instantly email him, I should see his online presence, and I should see some contact or info like any data that is on his openID. 

I know that things like Quicksilver and Launchy do this a little but in terms of process optimisation they are still off the mark. They are also not integrated into many systems that people do not really realise they use, especially online services. 

This sort of tool could greatly increase the effectiveness of things like GTD by providing a really 1 to 1 connection with the information that is known by a user and the tasks they want to perform. 

The web is the world and seemingly a large part of the future of computer platforms. If we want this to be the case we should make good tools to interact with it. All the current browsers and most of the browser extensions that exist today do not take good consideration of this fact. I think this feature is one of many that could be used to improve the human interface with the web and the world. 

More on why I think browsers suck later. 

Said Bear

This is a bear i made for a friend. It is not detailed but round. 

I think bears are cool but I think they would be better if they were equine. I think humans should do research on this matter and create a super race of pony bear tiger animals. They would surely rock.

In other news I really would like to find a simple way to get large maps without labels out of Google Maps. They are pretty. 

Small Services and Topology for the Same

Today I was trying to work with a few groups of friends on a few different projects at the same time all via the internet. We were doing a few things; research, content building, organisation and  communicating. None of these things by them selves are problematic and especially if they were been done in personal collaboration or by my self then no problems would exist. In this case however, it was very difficult to suitably take part in this system. I found that many of the small tasks I wanted to do could not really be done without a prohibitively large set-up time and more complex things I wanted to do could not be done without more sophisticated web tools. 

For example, I was working away and realised I had an idea for a way to deal with something I was not working on. So I wanted a tool that I could simply write a snippet of text into that would be like a post-it note. Not a big problem, but, I wanted this note to also be connected with the task I was thinking about and annotated so it would be seen by the relevant team members. Now I know there are tools that do this, and services that offer a lot in this respect but I can not afford to sign up for every service just so I can do a few different tasks, and more so, I can not expect all of the people I work with to do the same. So, the answer I think is appropriate is essentially a set of operators on basic communication networks and offer various things like content tagging, targeted messaging, really fast content dropping and so on. I think using as many existing networks as possible is really important, i.e. using email and im instead of creating a new notification methodology, such as the Facebook Inbox, because this approach lets messages go to non members and people who just need to know the content not anything else. 

A different example was when I wanted to create a simple and quick list that included images and some text, it needed to be sortable and searchable but nothing fancy. Now this can be done in many tools like Google Docs or Zoho but all these interfaces are pretty slow and arduous. Also, I wanted to make this list in a way that would make it useful for me later, so potentially I could get a feed out of it or at least use it as a data store for a website. In any case, nothing was really offering me what I wanted so I ended up doing it in a context that had the advantage of local speed, Compendium. Here i could make it both a graphical and context driven list or layout and get rich relationships between elements. Now I know I will have to remake the work later which I think is quite lame. So, I want a tool that lets me have more flexible content manipulation and output settings while also having a high speed interface. An AIR application may be a start and perhaps building it to provide basically a really fixable content bucket that has a hole bunch of import and export tools that are all based on standards. 

I hope open standard interface languages become more popular. I really think they are the answer to a lot of serious problems. But more than that,  I really hope people start to take advantage of them. RSS is a wonderful tool but very few services use it to its full. Similarly, dynamic OPMLs , lists of lists, could be so well used in certain contexts. 

I think almost none of what I have said here makes any sense. I really just want to say. 

1. Service should do one thing perfectly and nothing else. 
2. Everything should be built to work with other things in as many ways as possible.
   
3. The things things work with should be up to the user or the receiver if that role exists. 
4. Standards should even be used for preferences. For instance, how do I like being notified by a tool? The answer to this question should be used when I need to be notified by someone else's service that I have never heard of.
5. Naming and interfacing should be search to activity. (This I will talk about later)
6. Relevance should exist for everything. Like realtime, automated discourse mapping of everything that is relevent. 

If strengths and weaknesses are the same thing

I think in some problems the strengths and the weaknesses end up being the same issue. For instances in Co-ops, where a main strength is the localised control over activity and intentions and similarly a main failing point is the exact same issue. This is an interesting prospect to me as it seems to suggest that good solutions only come through a wicked problems analysis. Or at least an IBIS one in which there are tightly quantised strengths and weaknesses to, essentially calculate net value of features in a system. 

So I am not sure if this is relevant or interesting to anyone but I think it is something worth considering. I would perhaps even say that this is a good measure for how solvable a problem is. If solutions generally include features as strengths and weaknesses then great solutions are probably hard to find. (I have no data supporting this it just seems to be an interesting possibility) I think this is a little relevant with the idea of how to ask an answerable question. 

Artificial Limitations in PlanHQ

Recently PlanHQ have done a bunch of updates to their service which are making it a lot more usable. I think they are still missing the money in some respects and they persist in providing an interface which seems to remove all familiarity and context driven knowlege from the process of business decision making.  Workflow should not be ignored, yet the updates are exciting. Now it works in most browsers quite acceptably.

One aspect of their product which they are yet to change is the minimisation model. Currently the do not offer a free product, though next week they are opening one aspect of the product to free accounts, which in its self is not a bad thing but I think most costumers they could get are turned away buy the fact they have to pay even on the lowest level. My real gripe with this model is that it often inspires companies to create really lame lowest level products. In the case of PlanHQ it is not too different, their lowest level model includes a number of serious hindrances that are completely artificial to the system. There is no complexity involved just convenience on the customers part, for updating to the higher services. The limitation in this software are things like the number of users, which is 3, and the number of (presumably) concurrent goals, which is 10. There are a few other more legitimate limitations like higher security and customisation, but really, for $9 a month, you can only have 3 users. I think that is really lame. 

So in protest, perhaps, I have been using the software on a trial plan for 30 days. On Monday I think I am going to start paying for it but I am still really annoyed that I would have to pay $49 just to get more than a few users. 

Ok so I hate artificial limitations, especially ones you have to pay for. But all this ranted, I think that the limitations in something like twitter really make the product. Without such a thing it would be quite a different, and presumably less desirable service. 

Just is my last utterances I think PlanHQ should set up a contractor account system. That could be really nice, almost like a CMS service. Perhaps this is a distorted dream that would never work as well as Sugar or Highrise with companion services. 

Asking for Money but not Typesetting

I love this image except for the ugly typesetting. :-)

I really do not know much about its historic importance but I think there is some. I think campaigns like this could be really effective.

If anyone knows about they history I would be interested to find out.

Seen on Dark Roasted Blend one of my favourite blogs in the world.

reCapture

I found this really neat service called reCAPTCHA which uses segments of scanned books that are hard to ORC as CAPTCHAs. I think this is pretty brilliant. Company here. 

I am totally going to use this service for my apps online. A few big players are already using it. 

Luxury Things of Importance

I love this trend. I love the art and the style and the blood of these sorts of ideas.

So yea, Designer Gasmasks. I want to make one now. The artist is also pretty neat. 

Does anyone know a good blog for more of this kind of stuff.

Everyone can Function

Another great talk by Randy Pausch, this time on time management. I think everyone should watch this. I think it is pretty inspiring. It is worth the 1.5 hours it takes to watch. 

Great Cameras for a Change

The trend these days seems to be to make everything badly and remove the point of elegance and design from things like cameras and everything else. Humm that is a negative outlook, perhaps I don't actually think that. Anyway. Today with the help of Medgadget I came across this fabulous site including cameras of purpose driven design. They are all designed around event and built to carry stories. They use a variety of materials and methods but are all simply lovely. I think.

I need one.

Mysterious Places

The other day when driving back from BarCamp Orlando I saw an interesting thing in one of the medians on the highway. It is a strange tower like thing just south of Ocala on 441. In any case, when I got home I tried to find out what it was by looking at google maps then google earth with social data on, and so far I have found nothing. So... I decided to go visit it. I have not gone yet but I hope to at some point in the next few weeks. Then I realised it would be neat to have a map where anyone can add similar things. When I say anyone I really mean anyone I care about hearing from but I think that really could be just about anyone (email me if you want to add things and I will invite you to the map)

So here is the map with the first place marked. For some reason I can not really get it to give me the zoom setting I wanted so you are going to have to click on the push pin and zoom into it.

If anyone knows any cool places (in any country) please comment we can try to make a collection.



View Larger Map

Hearing but not living advice

I think it is easy to give great advice that people listen to and believe and agree with. However I think it is really rare that they actually manage to implement it. I think this is not because people are not good at implementation I really think it is more because a lot of advice is not designed well for that purpose. Perhaps there is also a proponent that is the kind of person being advised, some people are very willing to document and enable advice as it comes along. However, I think in general people sort of Grok the advice they are given, consciously make some kind of ruling over it. Though I would argue the outcome of that ruling is irrelevant, and then they move on. I guess I think it is more like forgetting than anything else, but in the context of implementing, as opposed to just considering, I think it could be related to a lack of emotive power, of a given piece of advice. 

So I think it is much easier to offer a advice that gives a good potential or ideal solution and much harder to offer advice that will actually get implemented. Maybe this is only the case because a lot of the advice giving I have data on is unpaid design consulting or similar. Perhaps where there is more of a sale there is a greater propensity to follow a given point of suggestion. 

Hermes and Buagatti Come Together to Save the World

This morning I was reading some old feeds and I found this simply wonderful thing. A collaboration between Hermes and Bugatti to make a version of the Veyron using Hermes leather and colours. To me this is more than just a great thing, this is the representation of a assimilation of two of my favorite companies. I love these people, not because they create expensive crap but because I think the do it with such elegance and style that I want to try to incorporate their theory methods in my own work. In any case, if someone would get me this car I would be really pleased. 

In other new, the blog, Sybarites, that seems to have originally posted this article is pretty neat. I think it is going on my OPML

Consultation or Comment Request via an Open Feed

So I think it would be cool if there was a way to make a feed that would be in someone's reader or something that was just there so other people could post things they wanted comments about by the reader. I think this would be good for people who were often doing consultation or who's opinion was often requested on certain things. I have set up some personal shared lists in my Google Reader that go to specific people, so whenever I get an item I want to hear from them about I just tag it accordingly. I think this is interesting and useful but even cooler would be like a feed address that people could mail to just to get questions answered by someone offering this service. I guess that could be set up pretty easily. Perhaps I will do it after lunch.