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Jon Udell

Biography

Jon Udell is lead analyst for the InfoWorld Test Center. He is the author of "Practical Internet Groupware" published in 1999 by O'Reilly and an advisor to O'Reilly's Safari Tech Books Online.

Articles

Blog

Jon's blog posts are hosted at:
http://blog.jonudell.net/

That word, syndication, I do not think it means what you think it means

May 08 2008

Something about the title of this week’s Perspectives interview, OpenSearch federation with Search Server 2008, has been nagging me ever since I wrote it. In the interview, Richard Riley and Keller Smith describe how the new Microsoft search server can extend its reach by sending queries to other search services… read more

Calendar software is natural for reading, but not for writing

May 05 2008

In response to a popular recent item — “We posted weekly.pdf to the website. Isn’t that good enough?” — Sarah Allen echoes my favorite Sergey Brin quote. Sergey said: “I’d rather make progress by having computers understand what humans write, than by forcing humans to read more

A conversation with Janis Dickinson about citizen science

May 05 2008

On this week’s Interviews with Innovators I spoke with Janis Dickinson, director of citizen science at the Cornell Ornithology Lab. We talked about several of the lab’s projects that involve collection and analysis of volunteer observations about birds and bird habitats. Courtesy of t read more

Stonewall Farm, Darby Brook Farm, and the collaborative curation of data

May 02 2008

Lately I’m obsessed with figuring out how to harness the cognitive surplus and put it to work doing better social information management. The other night I attended a kick-off meeting for a group interested in advancing the cause of local food production in our region. Inevitably the discussion turned to… read more

Rediscovering LibraryThing

March 25 2008

To prepare for an interview with Tim Spalding, the founder and lead developer of LibraryThing, I re-registered with LibraryThing, spent some quality time with the service, and was wildly impressed. At one point in the interview, Tim asked me how I, Mr. LibraryLookup, as likely a person as there is… read more

A conversation with Carl Malamud about access to public information

March 24 2008

This week’s ITConversations show is a chat with Carl Malamud, whose exploits I’ve followd ever since he launched podcasting a decade ahead of schedule with a project called Internet Talk Radio. Since then, Carl’s mainly known for his tireless crusade to release troves of public information to the Net: SEC… read more

Perspectives: Understanding CardSpace with Vittorio Bertocci

March 21 2008

The second installment of Perspectives is up, with Vittorio Bertocci1, author of Understanding Windows CardSpace This interview was recorded a few months ago, and has been waiting for the Perspectives site to launch. In January I excerpted the part about omnidirectional identity, a difficult phra read more

A close call: photos lost, then found

March 20 2008

While reviewing a white paper by a colleague on the subject of personal digital archives, I realized that I hadn’t followed through on a plan to consolidate a few different caches of digital photos from various digicam and computer eras. So of course, when I went looking, things weren’t exactly… read more

When the LazyWeb gets too lazy

March 18 2008

I’m running a couple of services that make automatic use of Amazon wishlists, and today I noticed that the current version of the API is going away: 503 - Service Unavailable ECS3 is currently unavailable due to a planned outage in preparation for the complete shutdown of ECS3 on March 31,… read more

A conversation with Ward Cunningham about visible workings and aboutus.org

March 18 2008

This week on ITConversations I have a two-part interview with Ward Cunningham. In part one, we explore his visible workings technique, which combines software testing with business process transparency. This is one of those transformative ideas that will not, at first, seem interesting and important to most people. And maybe… read more

Missing the cluetrain

March 14 2008

I wasn’t going to post this humorous anecdote but Mike Caulfield reminded me that it’s too funny not to share. After musing about a subscription service for running shoes, I walked in my local store, bought a new pair, and invited them to notify me in three months. Hilarity ensued.… read more

Perspectives, a new interview series, launches today

March 13 2008

Today I’m launching a new Microsoft-oriented interview series called Perspectives. The show will touch on a variety of topics including robotics, digital identity, e-science, and social software. I’ll be speaking mostly with passionate Microsoft innovators, and sometimes also with key p read more

Ann Arbor’s public library is a beacon of progress

March 12 2008

On the Ann Arbor public library’s website you can find a wonderful example of how two local institutions — the library and the police department — can work together to curate an online exhibit. In 2002, history buff and police sergeant Michael Logghe self-published the lavishly il read more

Linking to excerpts from the MIX keynotes

March 10 2008

John Lam asked how to excerpt fragments of Steve Ballmer’s keynote, and the principle of keystroke conservation requires me to answer here. The VisitMIX page for the keynote lists three streams. The links point to .asx files, which are wrappers around references to media files or streams. In this case,… read more

A conversation with Michael Lenczner about community wifi in Montreal

March 10 2008

In Montreal this Friday, McGill professor Darin Barney will be giving a version of his talk on citizenship and technology. Here’s an excerpt: Each of the telegraph, telephone, radio and television was accompanied by its own heroic rhetoric of democratic transformation and reinvigorated civic engagement. None have delivered fully on… read more
Jon Udell