Archive for June, 2005

Maps Everywhere

Well, as if it wasn’t enought for google to have my home seen from the sky! Yahoo and Amazon just released their own versions of mapping services:

maps_res_logo.gifGoogle Maps: that just uncovered most parts of world, some of them on low res, but ok, nevertheless they’re way ahead their competition!
ma_loc-map_1.gifYahoo Maps, nothing new there…
logo-a9.gifAmazon (A9) Maps, by now only available on the states, but with a rather interesting feature: stree photos, allowing you to browse trough the city sidewalks!

Ok, now seriously, I’ll pay a pack of beer to the guys that first delivers me address search to my place! ;)

Add comment June 30th, 2005

Radio Reborn

podcast.jpgApple just release a new version of iTunes, with PodCasting support! It’s true that I just arrived to iPod Planet, but I must share with you the most interesting moments with my new gadget:

  • First PodCast on the Road, in this case on the train: “Lawrence Lessig: Mix Me

  • My grandfather singing and dancing to the sound of an iPod! What a unique moment! Pity i didn’t have my camera with me, what memorable moment!

And now, with Apple support to Podcasting, I’m pretty sure that the radio as with now it, is sure to be dead, imagine being able to listen to you favorite program, not only saving it, but also listen to it over and over, and where ever and when ever you want! Well, it’s already a reality, the Podcasting reality!

Here’s a list of some of the podcast sources I normally listen:

2 comments June 28th, 2005

iPod in the House

ipodPhoto.jpgYup, it’s true, I just bought on of this! I just synchronized it with my laptop Trekus so I’m just hearing my first podsounds!

If I could just say one word about it? ROCKS! But if I was allowed more, then I could just say that it also RULES! Oh YEAH!

Something tells me that my travelling will never be the same! ;)

1 comment June 24th, 2005

Adopt A Chinese Blog

Adopt a Chinese BlogEver since people started blogging in China that we all heard more or less about the censurship pursuing blog authors. Well, today I just found a program that aims to help chinese bloguers getting their blogs out of China, into a free speech zone:

“Adopt A Chinese Blog”

The idea seems a nice, but there’s one important catch: Not knowing what your hosting (if like me you don’t read or write chinese) how can you tell if you’re not hosting anything really bad?

Add comment June 21st, 2005

Reboot 7.0 - Audio Recordings

Guy Dickinson just sent me the link to some of the Audio Recordings for the Reboot, check them out if you’re into audio presentations:

Add comment June 14th, 2005

Back Home

Well, I just arrived Lisbon, after an incredible flight! When we went to Copenhagen for Reboot, the trip was nice, but boring, the company had only got us business class tickets so there was no major action there! Our return flight was on economic class, which ended up being much more business class than the so called business class! We seated next to Vinod, an Indian guy living in Hong Kong and traveling throughout Europe, trying to promote is exporting business (he actually only export china’s products, but a all range of them! So if anybody interested drop me a line, we have is contacts!).

Sure feels go to be back home, to be with Patrícia again, it’s pretty incredible how much we miss the people we love, even when it’s just for a few days!

About Reboot? Well, to me was actually pretty amazing event, much, much more interesting that I thought at the very beginning, during the next days, I’ll complete my first day resumé, and post the remaining notes I have, for now I must regain energy and recover all the lost sleep! ;)

Add comment June 12th, 2005

Reboot - day 1 (Resume)

Well, day one of Reboot is over, and it has been a hell of a day!

I almost dare to say that it was a bit too much information for my brain to store in just one day! So many ideas, tons of conversations going on, meeting all that new and interesting people, but at the same time, such a short time to do everything.

So just follow to the next page for the resume on reboot’s first day.

NOTE: With the help of the same guys as yesterday, and a couple of new ones, we managed to have almost all of the participants comments online right after the presentations, again only possible thanks to the guys of CodingMonkeys and in particular their application: Subethaedit. Impressive to say the least! All the effort from the writers have been well rewarded by fellow participants, some of them even managed to get a name for our team: “SubEthaEditors“. I could stop comparing the thing has having a bunch of guys literally knitting words and phrases all together to end up with a nice and mostly coherent document.
The day started impressively with an Opening presenting Reboot by Thomas and Nikolaj (the main organizers of this conference). After their initial presentations it was time for Doc Searls to give us a memorable speech, from which I would like to quote some of the key ideas of his speech: 61212f3a4d3bc1adf5d224b594484ae2 Following Doc Searls, Robert Scoble came up to the stage and continued the opening keynote, he had some scribbled ideas, which he presented on screen, and I could find out the night before he doesn’t actually plans his presentations to the details, just goes with the flow! I guess that’s why is such a nice speaker. Robert put up the IRC chat window, so everybody could read the messages appearing in the #reboot channel along with is talk, once again from all the talk here’s some of the points I pointed down: d539d3ff4ba777638329b78f948d39d4 As a personal conclusion: Robert might have been too much in Redmond lately!. After the first break of the morning came the hard part of having to choose between presentations, so I headed up to the OpenSauceLive presentation. Presentation was conducted by Johnnie and James, and was more like a interactive game than a presentation. We had a small game that involved meeting the unexpected as well as identifying the fear of chaos, most of us have. After the game participants were asked to make some suggestions about some examples to them of good/bad marketing approaches, I decided to gave them to good examples of open source marketing which I believe are working very well: Spread Firefox and Clip-n-Seal. They’re presentation sincerely didn’t impress me, but might have been because they had such few time to talk about such a rich matter, just may be! :( Feeling a bit frustrated about the last presentation, I headed up for Dina’s Mehta presentation about “Social Tools for Research and Collaboration“, and to me, was one the better presentation of the day. Her presentation just runned smoothly and I got to take down some very nice concepts and ideas, so according to Dina:
  • “We need tools that makes us forget that boundaries exists”
  • “Teams are collaborating globally”
  • Tsunami help blog was one of the most important examples of collaboration using internet based tools
  • Technologies exist to link people that needs help to people that can provided necessary help
  • Chaos can be an excellent master, since the system self-organized itself and from chaos came organization
  • With blog connections you have an immense network of people ready to help you
  • Blogs are indeed a disruptive technology
  • Let your users do the talking, Observe them instead!
  • Forget physical boundaries
Some of the final questions posed to Dina involved classification matters, how can one control so much information as for example the flow of information generated by the Tsunami Blog. Finally on her final statement, she just presented us with this comment to which I couldn’t agree more: bdcbcb81cbe67525b0d53cbb50d2047b Following Dina it was time for me to move on! This time to listen to Ben Cerveny talking about Dynamic System Models. This presentation was some how sparse, and in the end I had the feeling that we talked about a lot, and touched so many points that I haven’t figured out much from his conversation. Might have been because of the time (13:30 - 14:15), since my stomach is used to being filled by this hour. After lunch, I had another great presentation, this time from the “Benevolent Dictator” Jimbo Wales, creator of the Wikipedia Project, although he doesn’t like to be called that way. Jimbo gave an excellent talk: “The Intelligence of Wikipedia“. He covered with some nice details the Past, Present and (near) Future of Wikipedia and some other related projects like: 667faa925b559ebf433a5541da140961 He also presented two different views from Wikipedia, together with the major implications of each view: 390cf6139ce21ae4d5ae2a09cdc847c4 The remaining speech covered some of the features of Wikipedia right now, responding and importance of anonymous users, how to insure quality control over such a large community, some of the advantage of free knowledge to the Wikipedia project, and explained in detail the Neutral Point of View Policy - NPVP: 61819c0b3f887666d8b5f0bdcc809b08 We also explained the Wikipedia governance and in particular, and proceeded to the community challanges, just before the end of the talk. Following Jimbo, from Wikipedia I just kept seated, for the next speaker was someone I admire for some time now, Thomas Harttung, founder of Aarstiderne , for those of you, who don’t have a clue about what that is, you should take a look at their webpage. It’s not only organic food distribution with a nice shopping cart site, Aasterdierne is much more than that, it’s a different approach to all the agricultural business, as Thomas stated that the reason is called Agriculture and not Agribusiness, in a way that agriculture shouldn’t be profit oriented but instead quality oriented. We could all gain with this! I got this important fact from Thomas speech, and I find it really interesting since we tend to do just the opposite: 92004e648751a9af3d5171c766704c09 It was fun to hear him contesting the main current opinion on ecology: “that we’re on the road to disaster”, and stating that the system is in fact stronger and more disciplined than we are, and gave some rather nice and disturbing examples of ecosystem moderation techniques. In the end was an excellent talk on the similarities between technological and natural worlds, how were all part of a much bigger system! He even mentioned a matrix style approach, in a sense that we’re all connected to an incredible high speed communication bus, even if we don’t realize it at the beginning.

Well for now.. I have to stop here, but have some more interesting notes to share, as soon as I get a bit more time! :)

Goodnight!

1 comment June 11th, 2005

Rebooting

reboot1.jpgWell, I just arrived to Reboot venue and it sure feels good to back online! Blogging just started! he! he! More in the next hours.

Just for the record, there are 410 participants registered for this reboot conference.

Flickr photos from everybody under the tag “reboot“, the ones i take can be found here

Add comment June 10th, 2005

Building of Basecamp Workshop

BasecampI just arrived from the “Building of Basecamp” Workshop, and I should probably write something down about it, but time is short so I’ll just keep for the immediate thoughts, and based on a super document made during the workshop, I’ll talk more in detail later on.

I really liked the workshop in general, there wasn’t that much new to me unfortunately, but at least I got to do a checkpoint on some ideas I already had and of course hearing some stuff on the first person is always great, and on this matter Jason, David and Ryan did it really well. The workshop covered several topics of the process of designing, creating and deploying the Basecamp Project Manager web application, so it was like a day to get to know the thing from it’s very first steps all the way to becoming what it is today. The topics the workshop covered were:

  • Introduction
  • The small picture
  • How did we start
  • From ideas to features
  • From features to screens
  • From screens to programming
  • From programming to user testing
  • On to promotion and launch
  • But launch is just the beginning
  • Moral support
  • Our mistakes

but about them I talk later in detail, for now it’s all the time I have! :(

Add comment June 9th, 2005

Building of Basecamp and SubEthaEdit

subethaedit.jpgI’ve just attended the “Building of Basecamp” workshop, by 37signals, and after writing about it, I had to write about SubEthaEdit, specially the results of having 5 guys with a mac with this little program.

Just the day before Melo had been talking to me, that it would be a nice idea to use SubEthaEdit to take notes together (this little application allows people to edit simultaneous, in a real-time environment, one same document, writing down you made which changes, read more about it on it’s site here).

editors.jpgWhen we got the conference we were just about to start when we realized that a guy, named Nathanael Obermayer already had the same idea, so we just joined his shared document! Super! Me, André and Melo started taking down notes all-together. By the time the coffee-break happened Magnus Rembold joined us, making us a team of five taking down notes about the workshop. It was a memorable experience, with an incredible result: a 1300 lines document with all the notes you can imagine about this workshop. One incredible thing was that when the guys put up a new slide, it would take more than a couple of seconds to have it all.

Just to get an idea about what I’m talking about, the final result are a bunch of lines that looks like this:

the colors show who wrote it, so as you can see this simple paragraph was written for 3 different persons, each completing eachother.

We just agreed no to share the document, since it’s so rich about what happened there, it wouldn’t be correct for the guys at 37signals. Never the less, it was an incredibly experience in collaborative working, and I looking forward to see it working during Reboot.

1 comment June 9th, 2005

Previous Posts


Calendar

June 2005
M T W T F S S
« May   Jul »
 12345
6789101112
13141516171819
20212223242526
27282930  

Posts by Month

Posts by Category