Trevor F. Smith: Exterior

Coworking

I've been working out of Office Nomads for the last two weeks and it's a huge step up from my recent stint of home office and desk surfing lifestyle.

Here's a quick video of the space:

BarCamp Seattle 2009

This weekend I took part in the second annual BarCamp Seattle, an unconference in which 300 people come primed with ideas to share and questions to explore. I like unconferences because I feel like I'm running at 4x clockspeed and I often get pulled into situational comedies like the lightning rants (I was the one ranting about lolcats) or sounding boards like the "Startup in a Box" session which Rob Eickmann and I pulled together after discovering that we've been ruminating on a lot of the same questions about how to smooth the mechanics of startup legal and financial initialization.

I was also wrangled into sponsoring the Sunday morning donuts and coffee, so I'm partly to blame for the 300 pairs of too-tight pants walking around Seattle this morning.

For a sense of the sort of people and events at a BarCamp, check out the bcs09 Flickr tag.

Twilleetio: Twilio + Twitter + Django fun

A few weeks ago I was evaluating phone integration options for a public art infrastructure gig when I ran across Twilio, a service for interactive telephone applications driven by your web app. They handle the phone esoterica and connect to your web API to determine what to say, when to request keypad input, and other such telephonic interactions.

I'm impressed with how they've greased the skids for new developers, and in about 10 minutes I had a Hello World phone app talking with my django based system. (Well, I called it "Talk Nerdy to Me" but let's pretend it was Hello World) It's clear that the Twilio team is in tune with what makes developers happy, because the docs and code examples made everything easy (like Sunday morning, not like Staples).

Then the other night I noticed that Twilio are giving away a netbook per week to people using their system, so I took a couple of hours to whip up a call-in system to record audio then tweet a link to said recording. I deployed the code to my EC2 cluster, pushed the code to github for public consumption, then submitted it to Twilio and called it a night.

A few days later, one of the Twilio developer evangelists pointed out that they have a new audio-to-text transcription service so like a crow drawn to a shiny bit of foil I added a transcription field to the models (thanks South!), added a new callback view in Django, and voila, twilleetio also tweets a bit of the transcription.

So with very little fuss I made a fun Twilio + Twitter + Django mashup and you can see the tweets at @twilleetio.

Hacking together these services with Django was neat, so it was a bonus to learn that the Twilio team dug my app and they're going to send this week's netbook my way.

Helping Others Read News Online

If you're a reader in the US then I don't need to tell you that the fourth estate is down for the count. As part of the technoratti, you might not feel the pain yet. You're skimming through hundreds of feeds in your RSS aggregator and you're bouncing around the web like a ferret on crack. However, you probably know a few holdouts who still read news on paper with their morning coffee.

Those people are suffering and it's your responsibility to help them. Their papers are shrinking in size and content, if not dying altogether, but when they look at the flock of available services out there for reading the news they prefer to stick with their withering pulp.

Enter Acrylic Times:

This is an aggregator which takes a few interaction techniques of newspapers and brings them to your laptop. So, if you have someone who needs a gentle push onto the web of news, try prepopulating Acrylic Times with feeds from the newspapers they read and then sit them down with their morning coffee and your laptop.

GonzoCamp

If you're a Seattle area news+tech weenie, I expect to see you at GonzoCamp:

In the spirit of a startup weekend, journalists, programmers and business development folks will gather in the name of news innovation. Using a barcamp-style unconference, the goal is to pitch ideas and work in teams to build a functioning prototype of a new digital destination or platform in one day.

Thanks to the University of Washington's Masters of Communication in Digital Media program, we have a great room at UW with wifi and whiteboards. Serra Media will provide coffee, lunch, and the first round at the Big Time Brewery to celebrate our accomplishments.

We're looking for tech-savvy journalists, programmers, designer/developer/UI people, entrepreneurs and some college students.

I don't know what we'll have at the end of one day, but these events are great for finding smart people.

The Last Speakeasy Paper

The last of the papers to come out of Speakeasy, my main project at PARC, has made it through review process and will soon appear in "ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction":

Experiences with Recombinant Computing: Exploring Ad Hoc Interoperability in Evolving Digital Networks

Abstract: This article describes an infrastructure that supports the creation of interoperable systems while requiring only limited prior agreements about the specific forms of communication between these systems. Conceptually, our approach uses a set of “meta-interfaces”—agreements on how to ex-change new behaviors necessary to achieve compatibility at runtime, rather than requiring that communication specifics be built in at development time—to allow devices on the network to interact with one another. While this approach to interoperability can remove many of the system-imposed constraints that prevent fluid, ad hoc use of devices now, it imposes its own limitations on the user experience of systems that use it. Most importantly, since devices may be expected to work with peers about which they have no detailed semantic knowledge, it is impossible to achieve the sort of tight semantic integration that can be obtained using other approaches today, despite the fact that these other approaches limit interoperability. Instead, under our model, users must be tasked with performing the sense-making and semantic arbitration necessary to determine how any set of devices will be used together. This article describes the motivation and details of our infrastructure, its implications on the user experience, and our experience in creating, deploying, and using applications built with it over a period of several years.

I'm proud to have played a small role in the Speakeasy team (made up of Keith Edwards, Mark Newman, and Jana Sedivy) and I stand by many of the concepts which we promoted.

There are some very interesting concepts in the technical infrastructure which explore the role of people in dynamic systems (e.g. device flocks or decentralized political groups) which I believe have implications to our long term future as the bio intelligence portion of the increasingly technical noosphere. If you're into that sort of thing then check it out when it hits the stands; I'll post a link here when that happens.

Other People's Blogs

I know it's slim pickings on this blog, but you can find me group blogging at both DorkbotSF's bog and Other People's Blog. The former contains full-on art nerdery and the latter is a startup blog for one of my news ventures, Other People's News.

350

All around the world communities are taking action to spread the number 350, the safe level of co2 in the atmosphere measured in parts per millions (ppm), and make sure world leaders are on course to reach that target.

We're already at 385, so it's urgent that we act together and build a movement that will get the job done and ensure a safe and just future for the world.

Please join and help build this movement: 350.org

Screenshots of Transmutable's Tomorrow Space

Here are a few screenshots of Tomorrow Space (my defunct company's product):

Front page: choose an event hall to tour or rent

Event page: an ongoing event with 3D space, text chat, and audio chat

Account page: your information and settings

Body editor: change your appearance

Events page: list your events and your invitations

Tomorrow Space was a simple tool to make the web a little less about isolation and little more about real time conversation.

Books about Cities

A fair number of people have asked me for a reading list on the topic of online cities, so here is my Delicious Library generated list of related non-fiction which I've kept around. This doesn't include any texts on the technical underpinnings or political form of online cities, but it's a good starting place for understanding what cities are now and can be in the future.

People who know more than I do should feel free to chime in with suggestions.

Arquilla, John. Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime, and Militancy. RAND Corporation, 2002.

Bacon, Edmund N. Design of Cities: Revised Edition (Penguin Books). Penguin (Non-Classics), 1976.

Beth Simone Balkin Jack M. Noveck. The State of Play. New York Univ Pr, 2006.

Balsamo, Anne. Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women. Duke University Press, 1995.

Bartle, Richard. Designing Virtual Worlds. New Riders Games, 2003.

Bollens, John C., and Henry J. Schmandt. Metropolis: Its People, Politics and Economic Life. Harpercollins College Div, 1981.

Boyd, S. Gregory, and Brian Green. Business & Legal Primer for Game Development. Charles River Media, 2006.

Caillois, Roger. Man, Play and Games. University of Illinois Press, 2001.

Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities. Harvest Books, 1978.

Castronova, Edward. Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games. University Of Chicago Press, 2006.

Chudacoff, Howard P., and Judith E. Smith. Evolution of American Urban Society, The. Prentice Hall, 2004.

Crawford, J. H. Carfree Cities. International Books, 2002.

Fujita, Masahisa, Paul Krugman, and Anthony J. Venables. The Spatial Economy: Cities, Regions, and International Trade. The MIT Press, 2001.

Gelernter, David. Mirror Worlds: or the Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox...How It Will Happen and What It Will Mean. Oxford University Press, USA, 1993.

Glazer, Nathan. From a Cause to a Style: Modernist Architecture's Encounter with the American City. Princeton University Press, 2007.

Hall, Peter. Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century. Blackwell Publishing, Incorporated, 2002.

Horan, Thomas A. Digital Places: Building Our City of Bits. Urban Land Institute, 2000.

Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens. Beacon Press, 1971.

Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Vintage, 1992.

Jacobs, Jane. The Economy of Cities. Vintage, 1970.

Jacobs, Jane. Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics. Vintage, 1994.

Kotkin, Joel. The City: A Global History. Modern Library, 2006.

Lessig, Lawrence. Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. Basic Books, 2000.

Levy, Matthys, and Mario Salvadori. Why Buildings Fall Down: How Structures Fail. W. W. Norton & Company, 1994.

Lynch, Kevin. The Image of the City. The MIT Press, 1960.

Mccloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. Harper Paperbacks, 1994.

Mitchell, William J. City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn. The MIT Press, 1996.

Mulligan, Jessica, and Bridgette Patrovsky. Developing Online Games: An Insider's Guide. New Riders Games, 2003.

Mumford, Lewis. The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects. Harvest Books, 1968.

Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone : The Collapse and Revival of American Community. Simon & Schuster, 2001.

Reader, John. Cities. Grove Press, 2006.

Rheingold, Howard. Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. Basic Books, 2003.

Rollings, Andrew, and Ernest Adams. Andrew Rollings and Ernest Adams on Game Design. New Riders Games, 2003.

Rollings, Andrew, and David Morris. Game Architecture and Design: A New Edition. New Riders Games, 2003.

Salen, Katie, and Eric Zimmerman. Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. The MIT Press, 2003.

Sassen, Saskia. Global Networks, Linked Cities. Routledge, 2002.

Sterling, Bruce. Shaping Things. The MIT Press, 2005.

Tufte, Edward R. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, 2nd edition. Graphics Press, 2001.

Tufte, Edward R. Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative. Graphics Press, 1997.

Wardrip-Fruin, Noah, and Nick Montfort. The New Media Reader. The MIT Press, 2003.

Whyte, William H. The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces. Project for Public Spaces Inc, 2001.