Advertise here with Carbon Ads
This site is made possible by member support. 💞
Big thanks to Arcustech for hosting the site and offering amazing tech support.
When you buy through links on kottke.org, I may earn an affiliate commission. Thanks for supporting the site!
kottke.org. home of fine hypertext products since 1998.
Beloved by 86.47% of the web.
Entries for April 2003
Tim Bray outlines some problems with RSS (
Tim Bray outlines some problems with RSS (RSS readers antisocial software?).
The emperor has new clothes
The current buzz around social software reminds me of the excitement around web services last year. Another similarity: both are new names for old practices. Web services have been around for almost as long as the web, and social software has been around for awhile as well. The new monikers allow people to talk about old concepts as if they were new, a useful practice in breaking old bad habits…as long as we don’t forget the past too much. (A la Alan Kay’s presentation this morning, particularly Douglas Englebart’s demonstration of the mouse and video-collaboration.)
Our fearless leader
Rael Dornfest, cult leader and cloner, is not a man to be crossed. I saw him just now, pounding on some hapless nerd near the coffee pots after the guy suggested that Clay is our new leader. You’d think an ambassador to aliens from the other side of the galaxy would be a little more relaxed.
Spring, an innovative desktop for people, places, and products
Spring, an innovative desktop for people, places, and products.
Alan Kay on scalable group collaboration (Open Croquet)
Alan Kay showed us a pre-alpha demo of some software (called Open Croquet, I think) written in Smalltalk and Squeak. The collective collaboration of Hydra + Star Trek’s Holodeck + The Matrix. It looks like what he’s done is create an OS based not on applications but on objects, which makes a bit of emergence possible (which, if you’re drinking the Kool-Aid here at Etech, is a good thing). Quite impressive.
RealVideo of Alan Kay’s The Computer Revolution
RealVideo of Alan Kay’s The Computer Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet presentation at a conf in 1998.
Doug Engelbart 1968 Demo of the mouse and
Doug Engelbart 1968 Demo of the mouse and about 50 different other things.
Seymour Papert, inventor of the Logo programming language for kids
Seymour Papert, inventor of the Logo programming language for kids.
Thursday happenings @ Etech
Looking ahead to what’s on tap for today at Etech, there’s Alan Kay — inventor of the Smalltalk programming language — talking about why the computer revolution hasn’t happened yet, Macromedia’s Kevin Lynch on personal interfaces, the all-powerful Clay Shirky (all hail Clay, for he is our God!) talks about the group getting in its own way in social software, Coates on UpMyStreet, Gillmor on Journalism 3.0, warblogging, Meg on weblogs and a little RSS controversy, Kapor on Chandler, Data Mining Social Cyberspaces, Mr. Stewart Butterfield on how games and social software are the same ass thing (well, maybe not exactly), nanotech, and social software in school reform. Whew!
Not to mention the BOFs: user experience and etech, a LazyWeb free-for-all, and web geoblogging. If your brain is not full by the end of the day, you’re not trying hard enough.
Socials & More