what / about

Above, my clumsy attempt to imitate Jessica Hagy’s inspirational diagrams. I cannot easily think like that - always seem to get lost in the detail - but wish I could. The piece of wisdom behind this configuration was given to me by a photographer met in Paris, long time ago. Try it! works most of the time.

Simple - i.e. non composed - concepts are able to communicate deep insights about life. Sometimes. But what strikes me is how even something as simple is difficult to represent with existing knowledge representation formalisms. How could we define love, or health, or work? I mean define it to do something useful, such as knowing when you are working or not while at the workplace, or decide if it is important to be fit to feel healthy. We would use other words, but it is not what happens when we explore the meaning of such a diagram; most certainly the word gathers memories of factual contexts, including events and processes, making the intersection meaningful beyond the simple conjunction of terms.

But if textual and diagrammatic hermeneutics are not your cup of tea, you can still have a look at this JH and Powerpoint-culture inspired digital art video by Clemens Kogler, called Le Grand Content (whatever that means): “…why, how, and what. These are the top words in teenage poetry albums…”, etc.

Yesterday pipes arrived (1, 2, 3, 4).

I will not describe the service, the picture speaks by itself; one can visually compose procedural modules to compute data from Internet sources. Maybe it is a “a milestone in the history of the internet” as Tim O’Reilly puts it but yesterday it was extremely difficult to make oneself an opinion since they were clogged most of the time:

Today we can, and it is a (small) disappointment. The service only accepts as input Atom, RDF, or RSS, and not arbitrary html (although one could use dapper to expose data). Atom and RSS feeds are only useful for news based services…, and RDF does not work yet! Tried with several foaf files as well as with the planetrdf blogroll . Hopefully this will be fixed soon.

The main problem is still:

• Scarcity: not much data is available on the web, in RSS rdf or other formats.
• Smartness: much of this data is pretty useless without reasoning, beyond very basic mashups.

However some aspects of the tool are astounding:

• Usability: the tool is a pleasure to use, and effort has been made to keep things simple, I reckon even non programmers will be able to give it a go after a screencast.
• Publicity: once a service is published it is automatically public, nothing to do against that.
• Collaboration: once a service has been publish anyone can view its internals, but also copy it (this operation is called “cloning”) to start editing and modifying it.
• Social Orientation: while browsing pipes one can see the number of time it has been run and cloned. I expect comments and ratings to be added in the future.

Composition of pipes is not offered, however each pipe exports an rss feed, therefore one can use it as a source.

I like the name ‘pipes’, even ‘tubes’, because it gives a 3rd dimension to the internet, beyond the deep web made of dynamic content. Indeed, rather than a surface of pages interconnected by hyperlinks, more people will start to consider the web as the result of transformations occurring under its visible surface.

Ok, so most of the blogs I read have a demo of some pipe, why not here? Well, unfortunately, mashups are boring; in a GIS context they are points on a map lacking context and semantics. I tried to play with geonames services given that some return results as RSS, but what do do with them, why would I like all Wikipedia’s entries near my place in Switzerland? Not really sure.

So in my opinion pipes are the end of mashups as we know them; the ease of combining feeds from everywhere will soon reveal the ultimate emptiness of the exercise. And from there on, we’ll step further.

Akira Kurosawa’s multi perspective narration of a murder, Rashomon, is on Google video (and on the internet archive). (from we make money not art)

Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will as well reports artbasher!

After yesterday’s film, with full making off (Koyaanisqatsi), websites for pro shorts (atomfilms) pilots from Scrubs writers going directly online (e.g. Nobody’s Watching), or other directly in Second Life (Four Eyed Monster), the question is: who really needs IP TV?

It is in the air as shows this elaborate hoax (or not?) where secret access to Google TV project would be granted by a hundred (or a thousand) successive signouts and logins in gmail (see techcrunch). I also asked to be part of the public beta of Joost led by Kazaa and Skype founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, Internet’s biggest trouble makers after Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin, without getting anything yet. So why? Maybe because it will look so great…

	by gavinsblog

Blogumentary is a “…slick and well-researched” (Minneapolis Star Tribune) documentary about why we (and of course the author, Chuck Olsen) blog. It is 1 hour long so did not have time to watch it till the end. However the first minutes are most entertaining and the whole seem to be a reflexion about blogging in the wider context of Web2.0 (where media such as videos and pictures can be exchanged exchanged on a large scale). Will update when I find a moment to watch it. (from Boing Boing)

Why do I blog this? The title of this post is a reference of a particular technique of blogging which consists in adding a why do I blog this section to each post - there are many examples but I first noticed this technique on pasta and vinegar. Do not want to argue but it seems to me that content can speak for itself, and that the global multi faceted image a blog gives of the - information - life of an individual is one of the most interesting aspects of the activity. Likewise I can hardly understand geek blogs; while I am sure of being one one, a strong interest for evolving technologies and the way to harness it - I guess that’s my take at a definition of a geek - can only be related to everyday life and to many, too many, other preocupations).

Michael Wesch’s <5 minutes short about the web, great facture, at least one step further from traditional screencasts and gives many ideas for the next versions of the eMerges video. (from Richard Cyganiak via Planet RDF).