the tweney review

Living online, it’s easy to get overloaded. Tools designed to simplify communication, like Twitter and Facebook, somehow wind up turning into extra inboxes you have to keep an eye on lest you miss something. RSS feeds proliferate and multiply. Channels of communication that once seemed intimate (IM, SMS) turn into high-volume streams of data that need to be managed alongside email, news, notes and more.

It’s easy to lose track of the big picture in this flood of data. That’s why systems like Getting Things Done are so appealing to techies: We like the idea that if we take an algorithmic approach, and apply it systematically enough, we can get this flood of information under control.

I’ve been a lackadaisical user of GTD for about five years now, focusing on two basic processing principles: if you can do something in two minutes or less, just do it now; and store everything else in a single place so you always know where to turn for your action lists and notes.

That latter principle is what’s been causing me trouble lately. I use a paper notebook, partly because I relish the satisfaction of physically crossing things off my to-do lists (shouting “Victory!” while you do that is a good way to give yourself even more of a charge, though it will draw looks in the office) and partly because writing things down helps me encode them into my synapses better.

More importantly, I am often in meetings where I need to take notes, whether that’s the daily news budget meeting or an interview with a source. If you’re a technophile like me, I’m sorry to inform you that taking a laptop into situations like that is still generally considered rude, or at the very least odd. It’s also distracting. When interviewing people, in particular, you want your notetaking to be as unobtrusive as possible, and sliding a notebook or tablet PC out of your shoulder bag and tapping away at it is the exact opposite of unobtrusive.

So a paper notebook it is. The problem: My notebook is completely incapable of syncing with my computer. It’s a pain to move notes into a more usable electronic form, and sorting to-do lists requires recopying them from time to time. Worse, my notes aren’t particularly searchable. British scientist Michael Faraday used a complicated indexing and cross-referencing system to make his scientific notebooks more searchable, but I don’t have the time or the inclination to maintain such a system, especially when I believe that computers should be able to do this for me.

Some possible solutions: I could use a system that captures digital “ink” as I scrawl it on the paper, but that requires special paper and seems a little dorky for everyday use. I could photograph or scan every page of my notes, as Microsoft researcher Gordon Bell does, or as MIT professor Ed Boyden recommends doing in his provocative essay “How to Think.”

A new online tool, Evernote, promises to make it easier to keep track of those digital images as well as web clippings, notes, and even email messages. It even does OCR on images you upload, picking out bits of text in any image and turning them into searchable alphanumerics. I just started testing out Evernote, so it’s still too soon for me to say how it works, but I’m excited about its possibilities.

Still, the scanning/photographic part is still a bit awkward: I need to have a scanner on my desk, or somehow improve the lighting and use a better camera. My iPhone’s 2-megapixel sensor isn’t particularly well-suited to digitizing notebook pages, as I have discovered through experimentation.

What I need is a compact camera that takes good pictures of documents, in any light, and then automatically — ideally wirelessly — uploads them to my computer (or perhaps my Evernote account).

And after that, I need a dead-easy system for searching and retrieving those images, along with all my other emails, Word docs, RTF files, and more. I’m sure Google is working on this for a future version of Google Desktop, but in the meantime, any suggestions?

“I just told my son that when I was a kid I had to leave home to play video games, to watch movies, to send mail, to see friends….”

–Martin Varsavsky on Twitter

“Folks here were never that psyched about the idea of Microsoft buying one of the hometown heroes and I think they’re happy to see that the deal is off the table right now.” That’s me, talking on public radio station KQED this morning about Silicon Valley’s reaction to the now-suspended Microsoft-Yahoo merger. I talked for about five minutes about how people’s emotional reactions to Microsoft colored what otherwise would have been a smart financial decision (Sell my Yahoo stock at $34? Hell yes!) and turned it into a visceral one (Microsoft is the enemy).

Why’s that? “Yahoo is probably the greatest success story to come out of the dot com boom. It really embodies a lot of the optimism and the work culture that grew up during the dot com boom… it has this iconoclastic, consumer-friendly and low-key attitude. And I think people really regard it as an example of the best that Silicon Valley produced during that time.”

I’m not at my most eloquent in this segment, but it gets across my main points.

KQED Radio News: Taking Yahoo’s Pulse
Download the segment: MP3 file

A nice surprise over the weekend: the Gadget Lab podcast I produce has risen to the #6 spot among technology podcasts in iTunes’ podcast directory. That’s pretty remarkable, given that we produce this podcast in a borrowed closet with no budget and zero marketing.

If you haven’t listened to the podcast before, check it out. It’s short (10-12 minutes per episode), and usually includes some lively banter about the week’s top gadget topics plus short reviews of a couple interesting gadgets. We try to put some goodies in each episode that you can’t get on the blog, too, like previews of upcoming reviews or anecdotes about shenanigans in Wired’s product testing lab. My goal all along has been to make this a short, listenable overview of interesting and relevant hardware news.

Here’s the latest episode: Wired Gadget Lab Podcast #27: Psystar, T-Mobile 3-G, and AT&T TV. And here’s the Gadget Lab podcast RSS feed.

I’d love to hear what you think of the podcast — use the comments form below or email me directly.

O’Reilly’s annual Maker Faire is happening this weekend, May 3 and 4, 2008, in San Mateo. It’s a festival of do-it-yourself (DIY) culture, and is a chance to see just how creative people can get with soldering guns, welders, circuit boards, old bicycle parts and lots of propane.

That’s just for starters. The Faire is now in its third year. Since it’s in my home town of San Mateo, I’ve attended each of the past two years, and the panoply of displays was frankly stunning each year. The Faire attracts a lot of same on-the-fringe techies that you might find at Burning Man, and indeed many of the projects on display have been created for Burning Man. But San Mateo has none of the dust, chaos and expense of Black Rock City. So this is a good chance to see some of these kinetic, firebreathing sculptures without venturing out into the forbidding Nevada desert. (I’ve never been to Burning Man, but I’m a big fan of it from afar.)

More to the point, Maker Faire is designed to give you a chance to talk with the people who made these projects, so you can start learning how to do similar things yourself. Granted, 90 percent of the audience is not likely ever to build their own moving, music-pumping robotic giraffe, and they’re there just to admire the handiwork of others. Similarly, lots of subscribers to O’Reilly’s Make magazine will never actually build most of the projects in the mag’s pages. I don’t, and yet I’m an enthusiastic subscriber.

So what is it about D.I.Y. culture that attracts people who don’t actually do it themselves? I think it’s two things: One, it’s just fun to look at what people can accomplish on their own, from a backyard zipline to an electric car shaped like a giant tin muffin. It’s like admiring art: You don’t have to be a painter to enjoy a trip to an art gallery.

Two, D.I.Y. culture embodies a kind of optimism about human capability. In a world where almost everything is manufactured elsewhere, then packaged in several layers of plastic and sold to you as-is under the glaring fluorescent lights of a big-box retail store, it’s encouraging to know that people can still do things for themselves. It’s that inventive creativity (and the skill with metalworking tools) that impresses me, and gives me hope about the future.

So even though my own efforts at making things have been rather modest so far, I’m looking forward to Maker Faire as a chance for me — and my family — to soak in that optimism, that creativity, and that inspiration. See you there!

Wired.com will be covering the Maker Faire extensively, in words, photos and video. Most of our coverage will appear on Wired’s Gadget Lab blog. If you’re going to be showing a project at the Faire and want us to know about it, please get in touch with Wired.com reporters Alexis Madrigal (email, twitter) and Jenna Wortham — they’re looking for cool stuff!

UPDATE: Here’s a great preview of the Faire, with video, by Jenna and Alexis: From Welding to Weddings, DIY Rules at Maker Faire

And here’s the detailed schedule of Maker Faire events happening during the weekend.

I gave the keynote address yesterday at the annual meeting of the International Oracle Users’ Group (IOUG), part of the big enterprise database tech-fest that is Collaborate ‘08.

The topic of my talk was how the decreasing cost of storage and bandwidth, plus ubiquitous, simple search, are going to change the world. I made good use of Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson’s feature story Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business, plus science fiction author Charlie Stross’s notion that history is just about to begin.

I’ve pasted my notes for the talk below (they’re rough). Also, you can get a list of links to my sources and related stories or download my slides: Rebooting history - IOUG keynote (PPT).

Read the rest of this entry »

If you follow my daily haiku magazine, tinywords, you’ll notice that it hasn’t exactly been “daily” for the past week. In fact, I’ve missed quite a handful of weekdays over the past couple months, and I’ve got a big backlog of submissions I haven’t read yet. I apologize for that.

Since January, I’ve been swamped with work, editing three beats for my employer, Wired.com — business, science, and technology — and I’ve been spending the rest of my time and energy on family. I’ll do my best to get the haiku flowing again soon.

I’m on the latest episode of John C. Dvorak’s video show, Cranky Geeks, this week. This was a fun one: The guests were former Ziffians Annaliza Savage and myself, both of whom are now working at Wired.com, and we had a lively, pugnacious conversation with Dvorak about filesharing, China blocking YouTube, botnets, and the war. And I managed to piss out not only Dvorak but also a whole bunch of viewers with my suggestion that the RIAA’s proposed P2P surcharge might actually be a good idea. Check it out!

This is one of the most difficult stories I’ve edited in a long time: How Good People Turn Evil, From Stanford to Abu Ghraib.

Kim Zetter did the interview with Philip Zimbardo, a psychologist who is famous/notorious for his 1971 “Stanford prison experiment,” a psychology study in which some students were assigned to play “prison guards” and others “prisoners.” The experiment quickly spiraled out of control, with the prison guards — and Zimbardo himself — becoming increasingly detached from any moral compass, forcing the prisoners to strip, perform humiliating sexual acts, and the like.

Thirty years later, a similar dynamic — with much more horrifying effects — was happening at Abu Ghraib.

Zimbardo thinks that almost anyone can succumb to these kind of “evil” actions, given the right circumstances and social pressure. Evil is his word, and perhaps its too loaded with religious connotations — but regardless of your point of view, such behavior is certainly horrifying. Zimbardo tries to explain why it happens without excusing people from moral responsibility for it. On the other hand, he also testified for the defense of one of the Abu Ghraib prison guards, and it’s in that capacity that he got copies of many photos from the prison.

Zimbardo plans to show these images as part of his presentation at the 2008 TED conference in Monterey. Although many photos from Abu Ghraib have already been published, some of the images Zimbardo is showing appear to be previously unpublished, which is why we made the decision to publish them alonside his interview.

The photos (and the video slideshow Zimbardo made of them) are very disturbing, and I don’t recommend looking at them. But I do recommend reading the accompanying interview, for its insight into just how badly people can behave — and what it takes to make a stand against evil.

For people who love punctuation, there’s always something to grieve about: Humans have trouble understanding semicolons, and computers can’t handle apostrophes. Fortunately, there is the Semicolon Appreciation Society for those of us who know and love this mark.