Alex Barnett blog : collectiveintelligence

Podcast interviews - smart people in the world of the web

alexbarnett — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 15:41:00 GMT

One of the fun parts of my job at Bungee Labs is to partner up with Ted and interview some smart people in the world of the web. We publish these as a podcast series (the Bungee Line - podcast feed here) over on the BCDN blog.

If you have ideas about someone you think we should interview, let me know! We're focusing on topics we think web developers might be interested in the worlds of software as a service and web app development, in particular profiling web apis. Related topics are good too.

I've listed out below our most recent podcasts below...plenty more in the works (previous podcasts are listed here). Hope you like :-)

Alan Lewis on eBay Desktop and eBay APIs

"As product manager for eBay Desktop, Alan Lewis relies on the same web APIs that eBay makes available to all developers. In this edition of the Bungee Line, Alan tells us about what the eBay Desktop is, how it came about, and various details about eBay’s developer program and web APIs. We ask Alan about eBay’s position Oauth and on open source."

Toby Segaran on “Programming Collective Intelligence”

"Since the publication of his O’Reilly book Programming Collective Intelligence: Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications, Toby Segaran has become well noted for his ability to explain easily-understandable algorithms for the kind of deeply complex problems involved in social applications. Toby joins Alex and Ted to discuss some of the high-level concepts that he tackles in his book."

Jon Aizen of Dapper.net

"Jon Aizen joins Alex and Ted to explain how Dapper.net provides a no-fee tool for making almost any structured web site data accessible via a REST API. In a past life, Jon was involved in creating The Internet Archive. Jon also helps the Bungee Line introduce romantic intrigue into the podcast.

Punditry Alert! At the end of this show, Ted and Alex speculate a bit about Android, Google’s open source mobile device platform, the Apache License, and whether Robert Love is involved. Please consider this as another demonstration of Ted’s idiocy, brought to you by the Bungee Line."

Jeff Barr on Amazon Web Services (Part 2)

"In part 2 of our interview with Amazon Web Services evangelist Jeff Barr, Alex and Ted ask Jeff about Flexible Payment Service, virtual user group meetings in Second Life, the Startup Project, and pry at Jeff’s views of possible futures of technologies that developers might anticipate."

Jeff Barr on Amazon Web Services (Part 1)

"Developer evangelist for Amazon Web Services, Jeff Barr tells Alex and Ted about how he became a native Amazonian, his recent visit to “The Business of API’s Conference,” and a bunch of stuff on Amazon Web Services, including: Mechanical Turk, EC2, and S3. Additionally, Jeff explains the newly announced S3 Service Level Agreement*."

How I find stuff I like

alexbarnett — Wed, 23 May 2007 22:01:00 GMT

The three main methods I use to find content I'll be interested in are:

1. My RSS reader - I use FeedDemon and have done for years. I can't get through each feed every day (not even close), but I do go through them systematically. My feeds are ordered alphabetically in folders, so if I finish one day on the "G-L" folder, I'll begin at the "M-S" the next day. I've tried ordering by topics etc, but the system broke down. I "prune" feeds as I go and aim not to increase the number of feeds. If a new feed comes in, one must go that session. My main criteria for deciding which feed will go is the last updated date - if the feed hasn't been updated for weeks, it's a gonner. There's enough natural attrition using this criteria to let 1 or 2 new feeds every couple of weeks.

2. Techmeme - two or three times daily. Tells me what's hot and what's not.

3. My del.icio.us network - once daily. I use this page to find out which links "my network" of human bookmarkers (my del.icio.us people) have bookmarked that use use links as recommended reading. Some of these will point to stuff I've already read in my RSS reader (or is waiting to be read), but it works for me as a quick hit for good reading recommendations.

I have 20 del.icio.us people who make recommendations to me this way:

andyed

annez

awsbuzz

bobreb

bokardo

chadd

cshirky

dhinchcliffe

JamesGovernor

judell

Korbyp

ricmac

sogrady

TimBray

twwilliams

vanderwal

These 20 del.icio.us people aren't making these recommendations available to me exclusively - anyone with (or without) a del.icio.us account can subscribe to the del.icio.us bookmarks of anyone else (where those bookmarks have been made "public" by the bookmarker). I didn't ask for their permission to add them to my network, but I'd say almost all of them are aware that their bookmarks are being used as a form of reading recommendations. Some explicilty use it for this purpose to republish in their RSS feeds (and / or blogs and add comments to those bookmarks (I do).

Another interesting aspect to the del.icio.us network feature is that I can see who is "subscribed" to my del.icio.us bookmarks - who's network that I'm in. These people (some 70+ today) are using me as part of their recommendation engine.

When I visit my del.icio.us network page, the "click through rate" on network-recommended content is very high. The ability for a bookmarker attach a comment to the bookmark adds another dimension too (agree / disagree, a quote or a quip).

Online, Video-based Technical Support Networks (on YouTube)

alexbarnett — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 16:59:00 GMT

Chris Pirillo has a very interesting experiment going on YouTube.

In a series of videos called Help! (here's the latest), he's recording answers technical / PC troubleshooting on his webcam and then uploading those recordings on to YouTube. In the videos he is recording (no music, nothing fancy at all), he's watching the webcam recordings of those questions uploaded on to YouTube by a community of users he's building, offering his advice in those videos and then uploading those to YouTube.

What's more, the community themselves are now starting to offer their own answers to some of those questions inline, so there's this kind of self-help PC / technical support YouTube video community emerging.

The reach of this experiment is interesting too. One woman all the way from Lancashire (UK) recorded her question regarding a simple way of editing her videos.

Forums and newsgroups have been around for a long time, but what Chris is showing me could be the beginning of an interesting format trend in the area of technical support - online video-based technical support networks . Will be interesting to see where this goes.

MIT Center for Collective Intelligence

alexbarnett — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 00:57:00 GMT

MIT Center for Collective Intelligence sounds like a great project, established to conduct research on the following question: How can people and computers be connected so that—collectively—they act more intelligently than any individuals, groups, or computers have ever done before?

Other related questions this research effort seeks to answer include the following:

(a) What would it mean for a group of people to be "intelligent"? For instance, if a single superhuman intelligence had access to all the knowledge and resources of a company like IBM or General Motors, what would it do? What strategies would it pursue? How quickly could it respond to changes in the marketplace? How productively could it use factories and money? How profitable would it be? And-most importantly-how closely could we approximate the behavior of this imaginary superhuman intelligence by cleverly connecting real people and computers?

(b) What can we learn from the ways human brains are organized that might suggest new ways to organize groups of people to perform intelligently? (And vice versa: What can we learn from the ways people are organized that might help us understand how human brains are organized?)

(c) The field of artificial intelligence (AI) has, for decades, tried to create computer programs that can behave as intelligently as humans. From the traditional AI point of view, letting people help a program while it is running is considered cheating. But what if that were fine? What if the goal were to create combined human/machine systems that were more intelligent than either people or machines could be alone?

The recently launched initiative has it's own blog and a couple of videos, including this one by Bob Metcalfe (Requires RealPlayer 8.0+). There's even a Handbook of Collective Intelligence (in Wiki format of course), intended to provide a conceptual framework for the whole field of collective intelligence. From the section called What is collective intelligence?:

"What is collective intelligence not?
Some people, when they hear the term “collective intelligence” assume that it implies individuals giving up their individuality to be somehow subsumed in a group. This is not what we mean.Collective intelligence, as we are defining and exploring it, is not about false consensus, cults, hive minds, or Groupthink. As described further in the section on factors that inhibit collective intelligence, each of these phenomena actually represents a kind of collective stupidity or mediocrity. Similarly, although the Borg collective from Star Trek is an example of people and computers connected together to form a higher intelligence, it falls short of the true possibility of collective intelligence.
As a statement of principle, we offer the following:
"Collective Intelligence relies upon the individual knowledge, creativity, and identity of its constituent parts, and emerges from a synergy between them.In its highest forms, participating in collective intelligence can actually help people self-actualize while solving collective problems."

Thanks to Alex Pang for the pointer.

P.S. Two other resources to check out on the topic of 'CI' (not associated with MIT but worth a look) is Blog of Collective Intelligence and Stowe Boyd's /Message blog.

Alex Barnett Podcasts

admin — Sat, 23 Sep 2006 19:58:00 GMT

Alex Barnett Podcasts - I like podcasting, here are the links to them.

2008 - Podcasts for the Bungee Line

Nate Bowler, CTO of @Task, July 20 2008

@task (or AtTask) is a Utah-based tech company providing a comprehensive, web-based project and portfolio-management package delivered in both a SaaS and on-premise model with a very rich web API set. We talked with Nate about the evolution of their web services design and @task's future product plans in light of the market opportunities presented by the availability of the increasing number of 3rd party programmable web services."

Steve Bjorg, Founder and CTO of MindTouch, June 20 2008

"Prior to founding MindTouch and Steve worked in advanced strategies at Microsoft focusing on distributed systems and web services. We talked with Steve about MindTouch platform, its rich set of web APIs and the implications of a programmable wiki. But MindTouch goes beyond providing open source wiki collaboration and content management - it's delivering a leading edge application integration and development platform called MindTouch Deki. Michael Coté, an industry analyst with RedMonk (analyst firm) picked up on both the podcast interview and news of the latest release of MinTouch Deki."

Update from John Musser of ProgrammableWeb, April 14 2008

"ProgrammableWeb’s John Musser returns to the Bungee Line to give us an update on the API action of early 2008. Alex and Ted apologize for the unfortunate audio treatment to the Bungee sound in the previous episode, promising “never again!” In related news, check out the new intro music for our “Cool Web Tips” segment."

Developer Community Management with Jono Bacon, March 14 2008

"There are few developer communities as large and distributed as that of Ubuntu, perhaps the most popular brand of GNU/Linux distributions available today. Jono Bacon is the first official community manager for Ubuntu. He joins to tell us what he has learned in his 18 months of working with this vast and disparate community."

Social Design with Joshua Porter, Jan 30 2008

"Joshua Porter is a usability consultant, web designer, researcher and blogger specializing in the art of social design for the web whose experience includes five years at world-renowned User Interface Engineering. Josh’s blog (Bokardo.com) is a must-read favorite for UI and web designers and is finishing up his first book, to be published in the next few weeks (details below)."

Alan Lewis on eBay Desktop and eBay APIs, January 15 2008

"As product manager for eBay Desktop, Alan Lewis relies on the same web APIs that eBay makes available to all developers. In this edition of the Bungee Line, Alan tells us about what the eBay Desktop is, how it came about, and various details about eBay’s developer program and web APIs. We ask Alan about eBay’s position Oauth and on open source."

2007 - Podcasts for the Bungee Line

Toby Segaran on “Programming Collective Intelligence”, December 13 2007

"Since the publication of his O’Reilly book Programming Collective Intelligence: Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications, Toby Segaran has become well noted for his ability to explain easily-understandable algorithms for the kind of deeply complex problems involved in social applications. Toby joins Alex and Ted to discuss some of the high-level concepts that he tackles in his book."

Jon Aizen of Dapper.net, November 17 2007

"Jon Aizen joins Alex and Ted to explain how Dapper.net provides a no-fee tool for making almost any structured web site data accessible via a REST API. In a past life, Jon was involved in creating The Internet Archive. Jon also helps the Bungee Line introduce romantic intrigue into the podcast.

Punditry Alert! At the end of this show, Ted and Alex speculate a bit about Android, Google’s open source mobile device platform, the Apache License, and whether Robert Love is involved. Please consider this as another demonstration of Ted’s idiocy, brought to you by the Bungee Line."

Jeff Barr on Amazon Web Services (Part 2), October 7 2007

"In part 2 of our interview with Amazon Web Services evangelist Jeff Barr, Alex and Ted ask Jeff about Flexible Payment Service, virtual user group meetings in Second Life, the Startup Project, and pry at Jeff’s views of possible futures of technologies that developers might anticipate."

OAuth Podcast, with Chris Messina (aka FactoryJoe), Larry Halff (of Ma.gnolia) and Eran Hammer-Lahav, November 3 2007

"OAuth is a big idea, but is it a "solution looking for a problem to solve"? I don't think so. The problem for end users today is real, i.e. authorizing one service to access your data by another service for use by the first service, securely and with control. For developers wanting to develop apps and services that create value through the use of customer data stored on other services, there is no standardized means set of protocols to lean on. Instead, developers need to waste time learning a new way for their app to be authorized to do so for each service provider, having to jump through the various specific means and idiosyncrasies of each service."

Jeff Barr on Amazon Web Services (Part 1), October 18 2007

"Developer evangelist for Amazon Web Services, Jeff Barr tells Alex and Ted about how he became a native Amazonian, his recent visit to “The Business of API’s Conference,” and a bunch of stuff on Amazon Web Services, including: Mechanical Turk, EC2, and S3. Additionally, Jeff explains the newly announced S3 Service Level Agreement*."

Interview with Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo! - Part 1 and Part 2, October 1 2007

Part 1

"Yahoo!'s Zimbra acquisition, the Yahoo! Mail Web Services APIs, Jeremy's take on the Business Week article discussing Yahoo! Openness, the fruits of Yahoo! Hack Days and the Internal Yahoo! Hack Days initiative, Yahoo! Geocoding API, Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) Library, Yahoo!'s AJAX API for Maps"

Part 2

"What Mash lets you do, Hadoop and Yahoo!'s formal involvement, the WebOS meme, something Jeremy feels strongly about :-) That was fun. Watch out for the discussion on "Meta-API Providers"... More APIs...From b2c APIs to b2b APIs, plus Pipes and democratizing the mashupshpere"

Interview with John Musser of ProgrammableWeb.com, September 19 2007

"Topics covered include Facebook APIs, Amazon's recently launched Flexible Payment Service (FPS) , Google Base, Microsoft's Astoria and relational-data-in-the-cloud programming models and services, SaaS models and API SLAs, REST vs SOAP, "Closed is Still the Old Closed" and plenty more."

-

Older podcasts:

Search & Enjoy! (Podcast) The Power of Search and Recommendation, June 6 2006

"Speakers from Microsoft, Blinkx and Last.fm discussed issues of content regarding search, recommendation, the semantic web and the ownership of data in the Web 2.0 era at Content 2.0 on 6th June 2006."

-

Microformats Podcast, March 31, 2006

"Here's a great podcast for you. All about microformats..."

Guests: Tantek Çelik, Dan Connolly and Rohit Khare. I think it's safe to say these guys know a thing or two about the web and microformats.

-

OPML Podcast, March 10, 2006

"It's all about the draft OPML 2.0 spec and a few other things thrown in such as structured blogging, OPML tools, namespaces and microformats."

Guests: Joshua Porter, Adam Green and John Tropea.

--

OPML and Reading Lists Podcast with Danny Ayers and Adam Green, Feb 12, 2006

"Last year Dave Winer started to push the idea of Reading Lists for RSS. More recently, the idea of Dynamic Reading Lists and Feed Grazing (or Grazing Lists / Glists) has been kicking around.

Its likely that Reading Lists support will become a common feature of Feed Readers / Aggregators."

Guests: Danny Ayers, Adam Green and Joshua Porter

--

Attention podcast : Attention with Steve Gillmor, Feb 08, 2006

"Steve has been leading Attention conversation for some time now. In 2003 he, along with David Sifry (CEO of Technorati), initiated the attention.xml efforts and has since taken on the role as president of the non-profit Attention Trust."

Guests: Steve Gillmor and Joshua Porter

--

MSN Search Champs podcast - Privacy conversation Jan 26 2006

"I attended the MSN Search Champs today....and what a day. Given the recent news and concerns around the data MSN Search, Yahoo and AOL provided to the government, there was a session set up where the 57 bloggers / online experts at MSN Search Champ were invited to discuss the topic with senior MSN management (Senior VP Yusuf Mehdi and VP Chris Payne)."

Guests: Fred Oliveira, Dion Hinchcliffe, Joshua Porter, Chris Pirillo, Thomas Vander Wal and Brady Forrest.

--

Attention podcast: RSS feedreaders and aggregators Jan 22, 2006

"I asked two of the RSS industry's leading lights to join me for a call and share their perspective on the question of where Attention is going with respect to RSS feedreaders and aggregators: Nick Bradbury creator FeedDemon, part of Newsgator (Nick also developed Homesite - sold to Macromedia - and Topstyle) and Kevin Burton of Tailrank (also co-founder Rojo)."

Guests: Nick Bradbury, Joshua Porter and Kevin Burton

--

Structured Blogging podcast with Marc Canter and Joe Reger, Dec 16, 2005

"You might have heard of the Structured Blogging initiative announced earlier this week by Marc Canter and others...there was certainly plenty of buzz and reaction to the news, but not all the reaction was rosy."

Guests: Marc Canter and Joshua Porter

--

Identity Podcast with Kim Cameron and Dick Hardt, Dec 09, 2005

"A couple of weeks ago Joshua and I had a conversation about attention data (as podcasts).

In that conversation we kept touching on the topic of online identities and their management, so we thought we'd invite two pioneers of the identity space, Dick Hardt and Kim Cameron, to a podcast session and discuss how they saw the connections between these two related topics: attention and identity."

Guests: Dick Hardt, Kim Cameron and Joshua Porter

--

OPML = Attention Data, Attention Engines and Tailrank, Nov 12, 2005

"Although we met briefly last week, Kevin Burton and I didn't manage to get enough time to discuss some of the things on our mind at the time, so we got a Skype call together and posted it as a podcast (.mp3, 42mb).

We focused the discussion around what he calls Meme Engines and I call Attention Engines, Tailrank (Kevin's latest project), OPML, RSS and Attention.xml"

Guests: Kevin Burton

--

Web 2.0 podcast, July 01, 2005

"Richard MacManus of Read/WriteWeb and I had a Skype chat this evening and recorded the call Talked about Web 2.0, attention.xml, a bit about RSS, APIs and more."

Guest: Richard MacManus

-

Attention podcast with Joshua Porter, Nov 26, 2005

"About OPML, Attention, and empowering people."

Guest: Joshua Porter

--