David Weinberger has posted some tidbits from a recent presentation from six high school teenagers. The topic of the presentation was how they are using computers socially in the course of a day.

Some of the comments that did not surprise me at all:

• Text messaging costs too much to use.
• “My attention span is just too short for email. I need a rapid response.”
• A few have blogs.

Some other interesting comments:

• One has blacked out all the names of her friends and all of their content in the screen captures she shows us in order to protect their privacy.
• Blogging was big last year, but now it’s not. People got tired of commenting on their lives and sharing their lives.
• Q: Do you listen to podcasts? A: To what???
• They do not use different screennames for different groups of friends.

via the sift everything experiment

Indy is an extremely simple yet very cool app created by peer-to-peer software pioneer Ian Clarke. Ian is the creator of the Freenet open source peer-to-peer platform, as well as Dijjer, a free peer-to-peer app designed to reduce the bandwidth needs of sharing large files.

Indy uses a collaborative filtering system to learn about your musical preferences in relation to other Indy users.

If you are an artist and want to get heard, consider submitting your music to Indy.

Why I blog this? The software is small, easy, and simple. And, it appears to work fairly well. I have had it running for a few minutes and have already heard some interesting new tracks. It is only at build 5, so I am looking forward to future releases.

via Slashdot via Buzzsonic via p2pnet

del.icio.us is a social bookmarks manager. It allows you to easily add sites, tag them, and share your collection of links with others.

What makes del.icio.us a social system is its ability to let you see the links that others have collected, as well as showing you who else has bookmarked a specific site. You can also view the links collected by others, and subscribe to the links of people whose lists you find interesting.

I have subscribed to del.icio.us/popular since November 2004.

A few days ago I used a tool called del.icio.us linkbacks to investigate Echo Generation. I was able to find more people that have added Echo Generation to their del.icio.us bookmarks.

There are many del.icio.us tools, linkback is just one example.

del.icio.us is also a subject of recent research on social practices in a distributed classification communities.

Working within the constraints of a very limited data sample, this study attempts to identify some of the information management and meaning construction practices of an online distributed classification (a.k.a. free tagging or ethnoclassification) community. Specifically, this study seeks to investigate the social and communicative practices that emerge when users are encouraged to share web links with one another by using a metadata keyword, or tag, to demark a social group, apart from using other tags to classify links according to an emergent taxonomy.

On April 10th, del.icio.us owner Joshua Schachter announced (via delicious-discuss) that a group of investors has taken a minority stake in del.icio.us. The investment is lead by Union Square Ventures, and the team of investors includes Amazon.com, Marc Andreessen, BV Capital, Esther Dyson, Seth Goldstein, Josh Koppelman, Howard Morgan, Tim O’Reilly, and Bob Young. Joshua will remain in control of the business. He says his first priority is improving reliability and responsiveness, followed by adding new features.

Why I blog this? del.icio.us is simple and effective. While I do not use it to manage my bookmarks at this time, I do benefit from the links others have bookmarked. I will likely use del.icio.us (or a similar service) in the near future. The linkback tool is quite cool too.

via Mindjack via Joi Ito

A new scale created by Michael Roukes and his colleagues at the California Institute of Technology can weigh items as small as a zeptogram (10^-21g), roughly the mass of a single protein molecule. The scale uses an extremely small vibrating blade made from silicon carbide. The blade is only 1000 nm long. By measuring the voltage of a wire attached to the blade, which vibrates in a magnetic field, researchers can determine the weight of whatever is placed on the blade.

The articles note that future devices that could even identify single molecules by weight, but to identify proteins by weight, the scales will have to become another 1000 times more precise, capable of weighing yoctograms (10^-24g), or individual hydrogen atoms. Just give it some time.

via BoingBoing via New Scientist
via Slashdot via BBC News

Always nice to see my school placing extremely well at the prestigious William Lowell Putnam Mathematics Competition. Forth place this year compared with sixth the previous year. Great showing fellow UW math students!

Math contests sound really boring, but I would guess they are actually fairly fun for those involved. I used to write a lot of computer programming competitions in high school, and believe it or not, they were a blast.

You basically had to solve a few problems, with a team, in a short period time. You competed directly against other teams, and scores were calculated and published in real-time throughout the event. It was actually quite a lot of fun, because it is not often that one can be challenged so directly in an intellectual sense. The joy from the competitions my team won those years ago will stay with me forever.

Of course, I could still participate in similar competitions if I had the time. Topcoder is a great way to test ones skills online.

via UW Newsrelease - UW places fourth in Putnam Math Competition

Mark Fletcher is the CEO of Bloglines, and that makes him someone worth listening to. He gave a presentation, titled “From the Garage: Lessons Learned Birthing and Building Web Start-Ups”, at the recent ETech conference. Some bloggers have posted highlights from his presentation.

I found this story via ITNorthWest Voice via Andrej Gregov’s Weblog. Read Andrej’s post for the highlights.

Of course, Mark also has his own blog, wingedpig.com, where he has noted some of the coverage of his presentation. He has also put a copy of the presentation online (PPT), due to popular request.

Why I blog this? Andrej’s highlights from Mark’s presenation are solid, and while most of it was not new information to me, one particular item did catch my eye: Outsourcing small projects to eLance.com — where contractors bid for your work.

I had never heard of eLance, and had not given much consideration to using contractors during the startup phase. But during startup, I really want to keep all my dedicated employees working on the real gold of the company. I could see value in outsourcing some of the small projects that are not make-or-break, but still need to be completed.

Dave Pollard of How to Save the World is one of the best bloggers I read. In his words, his blog is about environmental philosophy, creative works, business papers and essays.

How to Save the World posts are consistently filled with insightful commentary and analysis, and he goes into far more detail than most blogs. Dave’s content grabs my attention for a sizeable percentage of his posts (i.e. he gets a click out of Bloglines to his actual site), like yesterday’s post entitled Meeting the Acute Need for Entrepreneurial Skills.

The Idea: The New Economy will have an explosive need for critical entrepreneurial skills. Universities are not equipped or inclined to provide them. You can’t learn them just by reading a book. We need to create a whole new ‘channel’ for entrepreneurial education.

Why I blog this? Many of my posts will include links to multiple blogs I am reading, but sometimes I feel the need to highlight specific bloggers who are tuned in more than most. Dave is a blogger who is changing the world with every word he writes.

Sometimes you need a way to get quality audio input from a portable device, but most MP3 players just do not cut it. Fortunately a little buck goes a long way when it comes to music production technology in 2005. A few portable digital recorders from Edirol have caught my attention recently. I will be in the market for a digital recorder when I create my completely portable music production setup.

Edirol R-1 Portable 24-Bit WAVE Recorder & Player (PDF Brochure)

• 8 quality modes ranging from 64 kbps compression to 24-bit linear WAV.
• Maximum recording time is approximately 137 minutes (MP3, 64 kbps mode)with included 64MB CompactFlash card.
• Record via two built-in omni-directional microphones, external mic, or line inputs.
• Completely solid state design means no noise for the internal microphones to pick up.

Samples of a sax and guitar using the R-1’s internal stereo mics are available in two formats (original 24-bit/44.1Hz and downsized 160kps MP3).

This one gets tagged wishlist. Look at spending ~400USD for an Edirol R-1. For good measure, add as much memory as you want, such as an extra 1GB of CF memory for ~70USD. Hopefully you will not be dead broke after placing one of these useful pieces of hardware into your setup.

If you are really serious, you can consider adding even more function to your portable setup with the R-1’s big brother, the R-4 Four Channel Portable Recorder & WAVE Editor, but the R-4 will set you back ~1600USD.

The Edirol products get some coverage because two of the blogs I read, Create Digital Music and Gizmodo, have posted about the R-1. And because I have been impressed with my Edirol PCR-30 keyboard, so much so that my next purchase will likely be another Edirol product. It is great because it allows me so much hardware control in my music production software at a reasonable price. It is a different level of control to have physical knobs and sliders at my fingertips. And of course I needed a keyboard to record sequencer input.

Why I blog this? A friend of a friend from the UW DJ club (found their mailing list archives but not their site) mentioned he needed something better than his MP3 player to record his live sets. And when the times comes, I will be looking for portable recording hardware to use in my mobile music production setup.