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Blog
Jon's blog posts are hosted at:
http://blog.jonudell.net/
http://blog.jonudell.net/
Influencing the production of public data
July 06 2009
In the latest installment of my Innovators podcast, which ran while I was away on vacation, I spoke with Steven Willmott of 3scale, one of several companies in the emerging business of third-party API management. As more organizations get into the game of providing APIs to their online data, there’s… read moreNew England still too wet. Escaping to sunny Old England.
June 29 2009
We’re just back from a Caribbean vacation — with a couple of interesting souvenirs in tow. Under normal circumstances I’d feel a twinge of regret about turning around a day later and heading out again. But I’m not really in the mood to build an ark, which after 40 days… read moreJune 18 2009
My recent adventure in naming the times of day was so much fun that I lost track of the original purpose of the exercise, which was to improve accessibility for sight-impaired users. When I interpersed time-of-day labels into each day’s event listing, I used HTML DIV tags. Wrong, wrong, wrong!… read moreEndangered languages and linguistic best practices
June 17 2009
Daniel Everett’s recent Long Now talk about endangered languages (writeup, mp3) includes this gem reported by Stewart Brand: Among other things, the wide variety of verb forms are used to account for the directness of evidence for a statement. Everett originally went to the Pirahã in 1977 as a Christian… read moreJune 15 2009
When I invited folks to become calendar curators for the elmcity project, the person who stepped forward in Prescott AZ was Susan Gerhart, whom I interviewed here. One of her great insights about web design is that the right thing for a vision-impaired user is almost always also the right… read moreBulk search-and-replace for blog entries
June 10 2009
Last night I realized there was one more step needed to restore my 2002-2006 archive. All of my references into that archive from this blog, which started in December 2006, had to be redirected. What’s more, they had to be remapped. Old URLs like http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2006/12/04.html#a1571 had to become new URLs… read moreRebooting my 2002-2006 archive
June 10 2009
While spot-checking my mostly-reconstructed 2002-2006 blog, I found this plaint from 2002: When you are a writer whose entire corpus exists online, woven into a fabric of citation and commentary, it is incredibly painful to see that fabric torn apart. Déjà vu all over again. In 2002 I had to… read moreJune 09 2009
On July 1 I’ll be in London to speak at the Guardian’s Activate summit. In a writeup on his blog, my former InfoWorld colleague Matt McAlister sets the tone: What does the Internet mean? How far will the changes go? Which aspects of civilization itself will become something different, perhaps… read moreRebooting my 2002-2006 archive
June 09 2009
While spot-checking my mostly-reconstructed 2002-2006 blog, I found this plaint from 2002: When you are a writer whose entire corpus exists online, woven into a fabric of citation and commentary, it is incredibly painful to see that fabric torn apart. Déjà vu all over again. In 2002 I had to… read moreScribbling in the margins of iCalendar
June 08 2009
Last week I mentioned three ways for elmcity curators to categorize events: If a source iCalendar feed uses the CATEGORIES property, they’ll be included. If all of the events from a feed can be categorized, you can name that category in the Delicious metadata, using category=CATEGORY. All events from the… read moreJune 08 2009
In his writeup on Google Wave, Dare Obasanjo says: I’m sure there are thousands of Web developers out there right now asking themselves “would my app be better if users could see each others’ edits in real time?”,”should we add a playback feature to our service as well” [ed note… read moreMore usefully cool stuff from Stamen
June 05 2009
My plumber’s last name is Thieme. I was just looking up his phone number, and got distracted when I realized that the people search in Live Bing does a fair job of visualizing the geographic distribution of surnames. If you do a people search for Thieme, New Hampshire, and start… read moreJune 04 2009
Curation is always a two-step tango. First you collect, then you categorize. Until now, the elmcity project has been all about collecting. But as the nodes of this network of community hubs start to light up, and as curators gather growing numbers of calendar feeds, it’s time to start enabling… read moreTalking with Jamie Heywood about PatientsLikeMe
June 01 2009
Jamie Heywood joined me for this week’s Innovators show. His quest to cure ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, aka Lou Gehrig’s Disease) is featured in a book and a movie. In this conversation, we explore Jamie’s current project: PatientsLikeMe. It’s a website where people pool data about their medical conditions, their… read moreUseful feedback from old friends and new friends
May 28 2009
In the last few days I’ve received useful feedback on the elmcity project from an old friend (whom I’ve never met in person), and a new friend (whom I have). The old friend is Jake Ochs, an accomplished technologist who, like John Faughnan, was a valued online correspondent back in… read more
