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A conversation with Phil Libin about REAL ID

My first podcast on ITConversations is with Phil Libin, president of CoreStreet, a company to which I gave an InfoWorld Innovators Award in 2004 for its approach to massively scalable credentials validation. CoreStreet has worked with the U.S. Department of Defense on its Common Access Card program, so Phil has… read more

Darwin’s rhetorical strategy

While we’re on the subject of communicating new ideas, I’ve been meaning to mention a lecture I heard while on a bike ride last spring, when I was sampling the Biology 1B course in the Berkeley webcast series. It was the introductory lecture for the evolution section of the course,… read more

Talking to everyone: the framing of science and technology

In an item that asks How big is the club?, Tim Bray writes: We who read (and write) blogs and play with the latest Internet Trinkets (and build them) have been called an echo chamber, a hall of mirrors, a teeny geeky minority whose audience is itself. Very true. What’s… read more

Doug Kaye’s PodCorps launches today

When Doug Kaye first told me about the idea that was launched today as PodCorps, he had me at hello. Every day there are events somewhere that might usefully be audio-recorded and published on the Internet: lectures, meetings, political rallies. In many cases the participants would be happy to have… read more

Podcast feeds for LibriVox

Yesterday I interviewed Hugh McGuire about LibriVox for next week’s ITConversations podcast. In the course of our conversation I was reminded that LibriVox catalog pages — like this one for White Fang — include MP3s and Oggs for individual chapters, plus a zip file containing the whole book, but not… read more

A conversation with Bob Glushko and AnnaLee Saxenian about the interdisciplinary science of service design

For this week’s ITConversations podcast I got together with Bob Glushko and AnnaLee Saxenian to discuss their new program in services design at UC Berkeley’s school of information. I had earlier interviewed Bob Glushko about the book he co-authored, with Tim McGrath, on document engineering. Now a professor in the… read more

Skype podcasting revisited

My podcasts are almost invariably recordings of phone calls. Following the advice of my audio guru, Doug Kaye, I’m using a Telos ONE to achieve decent audio quality using POTS (plain old telephone service). But from time to time I revisit the question of whether Internet calling, using Skype or… read more

Too busy to blog? Count your keystrokes.

Some years ago, very suddenly, I ran into the brick wall of repetitive stress injury. I had to lay off keyboards entirely for a couple of weeks, and wound up writing most of the first draft of my book in longhand on yellow legal pads. I got through it thanks… read more

Online incunabula

My latest podcast is up at ITConversations. Here’s the intro I wrote for the show: Although Tim Berners-Lee once famously declared that “Cool URIs don’t change,” factors beyond our control make it hard for most of us to avoid link rot. Geoffrey Bilder is the director of strategic initiatives for… read more

It isn’t (yet) all about the Internet

I’ve been doing an occasional series of commentaries for New Hampshire Public Radio on topics at the intersection of technology and society. The latest one, which aired this weekend, riffs on an item posted here about using sites like YouTube and Blip to catalog video clips about candidates who visit… read more

Exploring Office Live

Today’s four-minute screencast explores Office Live. It shows how to codelessly create a database table in the cloud, add data-collection and -display widgets to pages of an Office Live site, and then manage that data through the web and also from a remote Access client. To be clear, although Office… read more

History or technology: Which is the better defense of identity? Both.

Kim Cameron had the same reaction to the Sierra affair as I did: Stronger authentication, while no panacea, would be extremely helpful. Kim writes: Maybe next time Allan and colleagues will be using Information Cards, not passwords, not shared secrets. This won’t extinguish either flaming or trolling, but it can… read more

Simple and automatic services

Concept count is a useful metric when you’re trying to figure out which technologies will or won’t be adopted. I mentioned this idea in a discussion of calendar cross-publishing, where I enumerated the numbingly long list of concepts I had to understand in order to achieve bidirectional synchronization of my… read more

Online accountability and the threat of impersonation

Tim O’Reilly has distilled the lessons of the Kathy Sierra affair, and Tim Bray further distills them into a single dictum: “You’re accountable for what appears on your Web site.” He elaborates: if a Web site is yours, you are ethically and perhaps legally responsible for what’s there, whoever wrote… read more

A conversation with Bill Crow about HD Photo

For the last five years, Bill Crow has been working on HD Photo, a new image file format that’s intended to supplant the JPEG format currently at the heart of the digital photography ecosystem. I first met Bill many years ago when he came to BYTE to show us HP NewWave,… read more