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Jon blogs at:
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January 30 2012
As we increasingly augment our minds I sometimes pause to reflect on the trade-offs we are making. What powers does the unaugmented mind possess? What do we give up when we outsource our memories to the collective electronic mind? In Dilemma of a Cyborg Carina Chocano writes: For everything that’s… read moreAnother way to think about geeks and repetitive tasks
January 09 2012
The other day Tim Bray tweeted a Google+ item entitled Geeks and repetitive tasks along with the comment: “Geeks win, eventually.” Here’s the chart posted on Google+ by Bruno Oliveira: A couple of things bothered me about this. First, there’s the adversarial tone. The subtext is a favorite geek quotation:… read moreWhen 2.0: Scheduling the Internet of things
January 04 2012
Before my podcast went AWOL I had been meaning to interview Toby Considine about his efforts to mesh schedules for things with schedules for people, and to define Internet calendaring extensions for that purpose. So when Phil Windley wrote to ask me how I thought calendaring might relate to the… read moreDecember 15 2011
John Ochsendorf, who teaches civil and environmental engineering and architecture at MIT, cares about ancient construction methods and the forgotten knowledge they embodied: rammed-earth walls, braided-fiber suspension bridges, Gothic cathedrals. In an enlightening lunchtime talk a couple of years ago he reviewed what these ancient builders knew and could still… read moreDecember 08 2011
It’s been a busy month for rogue plumber Harry Tuttle. When last heard from, he was deploying a filter to fix broken iCalendar feeds served up by the University of Michigan. His next assignment was at Rice University, where the downloadable sports schedules are available only in CSV (comma-separated values)… read moreMarine mammals, Sorcerer’s Apprentices, and authoritative publication of data
November 16 2011
As we saw last week, the future of community-scale calendaring is already here in some cases but isn’t yet evenly distributed. Consider the Seattle Aquarium’s public calendar. As curator of Seattle’s elmcity hub I’ve found four iCalendar feeds for the Aquarium: An Eventful venue. (iCal feed.) An Upcoming venue. (iCal… read moreAnn Arbor’s public schools are thinking like the web
November 09 2011
As I review and improve the elmcity hubs in selected cities, I am again reminded of William Gibson’s wonderful aphorism: “The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.” Yesterday we saw that the future of community calendars hasn’t yet arrived at the University of Michigan. But today I… read moreNovember 08 2011
Here’s one of my favorite scenes from the movie Brazil, Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce): Are you from central services? Harry Tuttle (Robert De Niro): Hah! They’re a little overworked these days. Luckily I intercepted your call. Sam Lowry: Can you fix it? Harry Tuttle: No, but I can bypass it… read moreJuly 28 2011
Think about the records that describe the status of your health, finances, insurance policies, vehicles, and computers. If the systems that manage these records could produce timestamped JSON snapshots when indicators change, it would be much easier to find out what changed, and when. read moreWhy Facebook isn't the best home for your public events
June 09 2011
Organizations should strive to own and control their online identities (and associated data) to the extent they can. read moreApril 20 2011
What if blogs had come of age in an era when a uniform kind of API was expected? We could then ask questions of blogs in the same way we could ask questions of event services. read moreHow will the elmcity service scale? Like the web!
December 22 2010
A blog feed is just a special kind of web page. Anybody can create a blog and publish its feed at some URL. Why not calendars too? read moreThe iCalendar chicken-and-egg conundrum
November 12 2010
If you're a school or a business or a band or a club whose website sports an Events tab that doesn't offer a companion iCalendar feed, I hope you'll ask your CMS vendor why not. read moreNovember 04 2010
Headlines matter. They're always visible to a scan or a search, while other information -- like decks and leads -- are active in far fewer contexts. read moreA lesson in civics, public data, and computational principles
October 26 2010
An efficient model of collective information management relies on principles like pub/sub, indirection and syndication. Translating these principles beyond computational thinkers is the tricky part. To pull it off we need to educate the kids we assume to be digital natives. read moreDeveloping intuitions about data
October 07 2010
Some kinds of computer files have different properties than others, and thus serve different purposes. Structured representation of data is one such property. If we are trying to put data onto the web, and if we want others to have the use of that data, and if we hope it… read moreSeptember 30 2010
Networks of people and data are governed by principles as basic as the commutative law of addition and multiplication. Indirection is one of those principles. read morePersonal data stores and pub/sub networks
September 22 2010
Most people and organizations think of the calendar information they push as text for people to read. Few realize it's also data networks can syndicate. When that mindset changes, a river of data will be unleashed. read moreTwitter kills the password anti-pattern, but at what cost?
September 10 2010
It's good to see Twitter driving a stake into the heart of the password anti-pattern. But the Twitter ecosystem wouldn't exist if it hadn't been possible to sketch ideas, and to explore the unanticipated uses that can emerge from the soup of active ingredients that the web has become. read moreThe laws of information chemistry
August 18 2010
Everybody learns that things in the physical world are structured in ways that govern how they can or cannot interact. The right shape will open the door, the wrong one won't. But unless you're on an IT track, you'll likely graduate from college without ever learning this corollary: The right… read moreThe power of informal contracts
August 11 2010
In a world full of services like delicious, FriendFeed, and Twitter -- services that can route feeds of data based on user-defined vocabularies -- you don't have to be a programmer to create useful mashups. You just have to understand, and find ways to apply, something Jon Udell calls the… read moreLessons learned building the elmcity service
August 03 2010
What happens when you mix open source goals, styles, and attitudes with Microsoft tools, languages, and frameworks? You get a cultural mashup. That's what the elmcity project is, and what this series will explore. read moreRecent Posts | All O'Reilly Posts
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