open-source, evolved

The Novel Tease of Crowd-Sourcing

Novelties. The Internet has been springing forth novelties for as long as it has been in existence; they come and go with intensity that is often correlated to the intensity of venture-capital (VC) backing. However, once the novelty of certain sites wears off, the "user base" sometimes drifts away. It often takes more than a neat widget or flashy doodad to keep people enraptured enough with a website to continually keep coming back.

Somebody should kindly remind the Associated Press (AP) that once upon a time, there was a little something known as integrity in the world of journalism. Now I know we're all scraggly, metaphorically speaking starving-to-death writers or artists these days, but the eight years of Republican-fueled tragedy is almost, almost over. Don't get sucked over to the dark side of shady capitalism just yet! Remember journalists, even before the Internet started eclipsing print media (and your careers) as a conduit for the most immediate source of news, there were standards and courtesies practiced by writers and publishers of content. Let's keep those standards alive today.

Let's talk style.

Software is a noun. Nouns may be modified by adjectives. In his lovely little book The Elements of Style, E.B. White informs us: "When two or more words are combined to form a compound adjective, a hyphen is usually required." E.B. White is highly regarded as being a master of concise style, and being a master of concise style means being a master of punctuation.

The telecommunications industry, more recently and specifically, the mobile phone industry, has fascinated me for as long as I've had my University degrees. I think I grasp as well as any standard MBA the interrelations of accounting, finance, economics, business law, marketing, tax, management, etc. But for all of my education, I'd never been able to figure out the economic oligopoly that has persisted in the telecom world when society has increasingly become so mobile. That is, until recently.

Recently have I been following a discussion on YCombinator news about OpenID. I find this to be an interesting discussion because I'm indeed one of the hapless geeks who attended the original OpenID Developer Camp hosted at Six Apart in mid-January. Since then has OpenID garnered quite a bit of attention and gained a wide variety of adopters.

Last week was the much anticipated MashupCamp event. It was a four-day long event, with two days allocated for Mashup University, and two days allocated for the Mashup Camp Unconference.

Now, before I get into the details of the event, I will make a small confession: one of the main reasons I was so excited to go to this event was indeed because of the venue. This MashupCamp took place at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. The Computer History Museum is a place I had been wanting to explore ever since I arrived here.

As the event was four days long, I was not able to attend all four days. I chose Wednesday March 19, the first day of the MashupCamp Unconference, to be my day of attendance.

It has been approximately seven months since first researching and registering with Kiva. During this amount of time, Kiva.Org has more than proven to me that philanthropy AKA philanthropic endeavors needn't be restricted to those with large incomes or profits. It's a sad fact that certain wanna-be "philanthropists" would like the general public to believe that millionaire or billionaire status is a necessary requirement to be generous to those in need.

Space Minnow

The theoretical framework of Space Minnow is something I've been working on since about December of 2006. The idea was to create a game which could be written by somebody (me) who has virtually no artistic talent. I wanted it to have the adventure and excitement aspect of, say, a PS3 game, but I lack the ability to do fancy graphics from scratch. My artistic talents seem to be strictly limited to doing creative things with words, letters, numbers and symbols (code). Therefore, the combination of both a story and its background code allow for the framework of (pardon the pun) this contextual web-based game.

News travels quickly on the Internet, especially when it involves some of the giants of the technology world. At first I thought the article might be one long string of typos, an error of some sort, or even a spoof by some bored media journalists. But nope; multiple sources have reported the rumor. Yahoo! and um, Microsoft?

One of the greatest things about digital technology is that it allows people to format their data into a type of mini-suitcase which can hold just about everything that a normal-sized suitcase could hold, but without fluff or excess.