Ray Kurzweil was the principal developer of the first omni-font optical character recognition system, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first CCD flatbed scanner, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition system, and the first electronic musical instrument capable of recreating the sound of a grand piano (my personal favorite shown here).

I transcribed the ending of an interview he gave after his keynote at the Telecosm Conference in Lake Tahoe. You can hear the rest at
Podtech.net

'In 5 years computers will start to disappear as rectangular objects and be integrated into our clothing and our environment. Images will be written directly to our retina from eyeglasses creating virtual reality environments. We will use really effective natural language recognition and translation between us and our computers as our virtual world deeply integrates with our real world.'

His latest book is
Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

piano Kurzweil future

Let's take a stroll across the hemispheres.

From right to left if you please, or if you don't please.
Firstly, an inspired web-site that dares you to navigate without clicking. Take the challenge, win a cupie doll, but
Don't Click It

Edit a webpage without a desktop application? Impossible you say...
I have no idea what this program could be used for but it's just way cool
Flash Text Editor

Now a jig to the left with these sites for tagmiesters. First a researchers' utility for saving, tagging, and sharing bookmarks.
Connotea

And finally this tongue-in-cheek site for our list-making, classifying, socks-in-the-drawer crowd.
Very Small Objects

brain connotea web tools ajax

Ok, I'm easy...

It doesn't take a lot to wow me out of my socks.
The fact that McDonalds has gone wireless should be a shrug not an epiphany, but WOW!!
What are they thinking?
Can you see thousands of soccer moms plopping the kids into MickeyD playland while they surf to the new USDA Food Guide Pyramid site to plug a "Big and Tasty" into the calorie counter.

Here's a Google map of the closest Wired McDonalds to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. (WH in lower left-hand corner).

McDonald's now offers Wi-Fi services ("hotspots") in more than 6,000 McDonald's restaurants around the world -

wireless mcdonalds

I understand how it happened. I opened my mouth about RSS on a listserv and voila, found myself invited to speak at the

The meeting is called: Semantic Conflict, Mapping, and Enablement: Making Commitments Together. One offering reads:
Netcentric Semantic Linking: An Approach for Enterprise Semantic Interoperability(Paper).
Let's raise our glasses and toast ontological coherence!

What am I doing here?


My brain is hemorraging!

I've trained some non-techies to use RSS/blogs, but these folks were refugees from "A Beautiful Mind". Bearded and sandaled PhDs who thrive on topics arcane and intellectual.
My bread is buttered with a more rudimentary spread.

Early on in my preparation I decided not to try to hang with the intelligentsia, but to throw them a curve, a bit of humor midst an otherwise cheerless ensemble. I declared the podium an "acronym free zone" and rolled through the blogosphere with admitted aplomb. Here's a sample:

His Empire has been misunderstood.
Viewed as monolithic, inaccessible.
A public relations nightmare

In an effort to show everyone his softer, human side the icon of EVIL removed his mask.

nsf ontology taxonomy darth rss blog blogosphere weblog

Curiosity in the recent deployment of technorati tags led me to look for a way to join the party. George Hotelling wrote a sweetly simple perl plugin for Movable Type that turns keywords into technorati tags.
Installation was a snap, but getting technorati to recognize the tags took a bit of tweeking via a support team (Kevin Marks) that rivals any corporate help line I've ever used.
Bottom line:
Make sure the call to create the tags is in the MTBody statement of your Atom feed for technorati and your Main Index template for public web viewing. I place my tags at the tail end of my skimmer's wake.

Insufferable frustration brought me to the web site of Jay Allen, curator of a most excellent MT-Blacklist perl plugin that helps to eliminate comment spam.
I had just finished deleting, one at a time, a hundred or so comment and ping spams for "texas hold'em" when I decided there must be a better way.
Installation of his award winning plugin was a snap. Just be sure you download the right release for the version of MT your running (I didn't).
Instead of using the ineffective IP banning technique MT provides, this module creates a blacklist of line items and a one step comment spam deletion across your blog.
I'll let you know how it works.
Stay Tuned

Ok, It's been two days since I "plugged-in" the blacklist stopper. I got a dozen trackback spam, found the plugin link at the bottom of the trackback page in MT, de-spammed the entire site and added the spamtext to the ban list with one click --- AWESOME!
jg

MT movabletype commentspam spam technorati tags folksonomy

Let's collectively genuflec to the cutting edge communion that is the military-industrial complex. They gave us the internet (Arpanet -history buffs), and now a noise cancellation device for cell-phones; from tank to SUV.

The Aliph Jawbone represents a much appreciated breakthrough. The communications industry, seemingly controlled by marketing minions who tout style over substance, glitch and glamour over function, just might pay attention. The development of a noise cancellation headset that works with a number of major cellphone vendors should point the way toward a thorough analysis of the communications environment that the Japanese call Keitai (pronounced: kaytie).

cell-phone mobile-phone keitai jawbone

I should have known better. I thought the browser incompatibility wars were over and done with once Content Management Systems (like Moveable Type) took control of display. I am so naive.
When I checked the look of this blog in IE (which you should never use yourself, dear reader) the banner was missing and the newly defined Radio Blog was all out of whack.
The look is mostly uniform now and the tunes are crankin'.
But maybe this lot is just not enough for your eclectic tastes. Check this:



A desktop player that avoids annoying timeouts from the lastfm server. More importantly if you're like me you can't resist clicking on the profile icons of online lastfm users. It's an addiction. I am weak. MyLastFM doesn't make me stronger but it puts the cork back in the bottle.

lastfm mylastfm radioblog radio blog

For the purposes of this investigation I limited my inquiry to these criteria that fit my specific needs (and maybe yours as well):

1/ freeware
2/ can search network drives
3/ no spam or hidden components introduced by installation
4/ can search email personal folders

The desktop search tools that meet these criteria are:

Copernic Desktop Search
Blinx
Microsoft Desktop Search (beta)

Copernic Desktop Search: Grade B+
Copernic is a fast and easy install. Neither Ad-aware or Spybot discovered any hidden components after installation.
Copernic indexing interface is highly configurable and user friendly. It indexes Word, WdPerfect, pdf, html, rtf, Excel, Powerpoint, and many other standard documents types.
This is the only application I found that can also index Outlook personal folders and contact lists.

Comparison review of Copernic/Google

Positive review of Copernic

Received highest rating in Desktop search comparison by ZDnet

Blinx: Grade C
Although Blinx is typically rated as highly as Copernic, it fails to index WdPerfect files.

Microsoft Desktop Search: Grade C-
The recent release of the beta version of Microsoft Desktop Search is a huge improvement over the the cludgy Microsoft Indexing Service, but many caveats remain.
1/ indexing took twice as long as some of the other products
2/ html pages are not included in the index
3/ the desktop search bar is integrated with the websearch toolbar that attaches to your browser.
4/ Email search is not fully functional in this version

Microsoft Indexing Service: Grade D
This rarely used component of the Windows operating system lies within the Control Panel/Administrative Tools/Services and is, by default, set to manual. In my test of the “service” last month I found a substantial drain of system speed and only a modest increase in the speed of the “find” command.

Google Desktop: does not fit criteria (cannot index network drives)
Although GD does not index network drives I include these comparisons because of the popularity of the application. GD has a clean and user friendly interface, but does not allow users to select folders to index, nor does it index email unless it has been opened on your system.

blinx copernic google toolbar

I read about this 'net radio service on Liz Lawley's blog,
She broadened the nature of the riff to include the social computing aspect, "...systems where the communication is implicit, where the social component is the emergent information that comes from multiple users...". Last FM provides a listening experience that, frankly, blows satellite radio out of the sky. The aural application of a concept that Peter Merholz mentioned in his article about meta-tagging by the masses. A similar conceptualization of socially engineered selection is put to effective use in the Snap search engine. Thousands of users input data about data by just going about their business as usual. The ramifications are exciting. The painpoints of indexing (controlled vocabularies, metatags, and thesauri) have a new champion, an accupuncturist whose needle is an amorphous network of machine enabled end-users.

Think about A9.com, they capture search terms and bookmarks from hundreds of thousands of folk. How long before the clever minions at Amazon draw the dashed line between search term and "best" match that all those users have selected. It's all there on one server, waiting to be culled.

This is my only New Year's prognostication: A9 will be the next big thing in social networking.

Oh, and BTW Last FM is the BOMB

lastfm lawley snap.com folksonomy

I marvel at how we humans tolerate each other. The twisted strands of DNA that help forge our personalities make us all free-spirited snowflakes, no two alike, and yet from sandbox to conference room we manage to avoid kicking sand at each other...most of the time. Our genetic yearning for individuality seems tempered by an equally strong, mitigating need for social interaction.

And so….

A quick tutorial on the collaboration phenom "wiki", culled from the most fruitful example of wikidom, "wikipedia:

Philosophical meat has been added to wiki bones by shoe-horning a bit of zen into the practice:

Wabi - Sabi is the beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete.
It is the beauty of things modest and humble.
It is the beauty of things unconventional.
It is the essence of wiki.

Have you thought “So what”, yet?

Here’s an imperfect balance of wiki form and bibliographic function called “Wikindx”. If your team periodically publishes web and hard-copy bibliographies, Wikindx can provide a shared space for compilation.