Programmable Web continues to rock

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If you are interested in how mashups are shaking up the web world, or interested in mashing up your own content, John Musser’s Programmable Web is the best place to start.    This is a  very well-designed website with enormous content depth.   John’s listed thousands of mashups and APIs and categorized them in helpful ways.

Mashups are reshaping the internet in very interesting and dynamic ways and will continue to do this for some time.    For me it’s interesting to see the model of the early internet kind of “swing back” and again be characterized by information sharing rather than the “closed walls” that came about when big money started to flow into the system.  However this poses a challenge for new companies based on mashed up content because ownership of the content that results from a mashup is not always easy to define.   At Mashup Camp 2 I remember talking with Venture Capitalist Peter Rip who at that time felt that mashups *of themselves* were not the key value proposition, rather how the mashup might enhance the prospects of an existing company.   I’m still digesting his notion because it may lie at the heart of how most websites will shake out in the future.

As a user I’m inclined to want an internet that is free or very cheap, very open, very rich with content, and has few restrictions on the use or mashing up of content.   However as a travel website entrepreneur I don’t relish the thought of creating a great site only to have it’s content and ideas nabbed without any compensation.

Brain Mind Institute

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Some of the best AI work is now coming from Dr Markram at the Brain Mind institute.   Read his bio for a glimpse into the “mind” of the machine.   This institute may be the first place where a computer will become conscious and self aware, though it’s also possible this will come from a Google, MSN, or Yahoo server farm thanks to the massive parallel processing.    However, those places are not focused on AI where BMI is seeking to reverse engineer the human brain, and has made a lot of progress in this direction.

Save the Children

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Charlie Rose is hosting Cokie Roberts of ABC news and former Senator Bill First who both are working for children around the world as part of the superb efforts of “Save the Children” which is working for global health, poverty, and education for all children.  Roberts is pointing out the fact that is routinely and tragically overlooked – helping reduce poverty in the developing world will *decrease* births and is thus likely to *increase* standards of living for everybody.     Many fiscal conservatives fail to “do the math” on global development – an excersize that leads you to fund development efforts at very high levels rather than funding military efforts which generally have very dubious returns on the investment.

Frist, when asked why he wasn’t running for President, said he wanted to focus on his work to save children for the next few years.  Bravo to him and to Save the Children for this excellent work.

Canyon Creek Lakes, Trinity Alps, Northern California

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Above Lower Canyon Creek Lake looking South

Originally uploaded by JoeDuck.

We continued our labor day tradition of meeting our great friends in Weaverville, CA and then hiking in to the Trinity Alps Wilderness along the trail up to the Canyon Creek Lakes.    We camp about 4 miles in and then hike into the lakes the next day which is another 4 miles.    It’s a fantastic trip with the kind of scenery you find pretty much only in Northern California – sweeping mountain vistas, smooth granite outcrops and peaks, pristine mountain lakes, streams, and waterfalls.    Azure blues and deep greens and a star filled sky complete with the recent meteor shower.   It doesn’t get much better than that and the Trinity Alps are one of my favorite places in the whole world.

One really cool addition to the experience this year was looking at the hike through Google Earth, where by tilting the imagery you can really get a neat feel for the vistas along the actual hike.     We also found some photos of our first trip in to the Canyon Creek Lakes some 22 years ago. The scenery had not changed but … um … I think we have

Portland Search Marketing Group, SearchFest 2008, and SES San Jose

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Here’s a great post from Scott about SES San Jose. The Portland SEM community is growing fast and I wish I could get up there more often and attend some meetings and hang with my fellow Oregon techno peeples, but Portland is almost as far away from me as Silicon Valley, the undisputed capital of … well … most of the really neat stuff happening online these days. In fact my frequent trips to Silicon Valley may be skewing my perception of how fast things are changing. For example very few people I know here in Oregon, and few of my hundreds of close relatives back east are on Facebook or Flickr. It’s even tough to get people to join Flickr so they can see pix of themselves I’ve taken. Ludditism is no longer the problem for most people, rather it’s just silly human stubbornness about technology.

In any case I do want to plug Scott and the SEM PDX conference coming up in March of 2008 –“SearchFest 2008”.

Here is the blurb from the SEM PDX mail I just got:

SEMpdx Presents Searchfest 2008
When: Monday, March 10, 2008
Where: Portland Zoo
Format: All Day Event with Dual Tracks

Confirmed Speakers (to date):
Rand Fishkin, SEOmoz
Matt McGee, Marchex / Small Business SEM
Jeff Pruitt, SEMPO / ICrossing
Stoney deGeyter, Pole Position Marketing
John Andrews, Competitive Webmastering / Master of Sphinn
Marshall Simmonds, New York Times
Paul Colligan, The Affiliate Guy
Dan Harbison, Portland Trailblazers / Iamatrailblazersfan.com

More top speakers to be announced soon. Stay tuned!

Canyon Creek Contemplations

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This morning I woke up along Canyon Creek in Trinity Alps Wilderness of Northern California. This is a great hike we’ve done several times, and I’ll get the pix up tomorrow. We had some fun conversations at camp and around the fire as several meteors streaked across the magnificent night sky:

I think Chem trail conspiracy notions are silly, but they came up:
Chem Trails – nice description of the issues

Star and Moon motion
http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/970518.html

Mercury

Wow, and the $2000 EPA cleanup of broken flourescent bulb is really quite a story , and one very related to Mercury. In that story evil Fox news notes what appears to be a real environmental disconnect between advocacy for using compact flourescents and the dangers that will be caused by the ones that get broken and go to landfills. I remain confused about this. In fact I just broke one on the porch last week and had *no idea at all* about special cleanup needed, so I hope we all live.

Google Earth and Maps has some neat imagery of Canyon Creek Lakes area. If you don’t have Google earth it’s quite an amazing and free application to visualize cities and trails. Maps does not need download but Google Earth is a fanastic and free download.

Here’s the NYT article about life being a computer simulation

Here is Kurzweil’s AI site for updates on the singularity and conscious computing. It reads a bit sillier than it should based on his scientific and history “credentials” and the fact many AI folks think conscious computing is only 1-2 decades away.

Here’s my take on two neat AI projects

Chips and Human Neuron Salsa … and this related item just in from Israel IMHO the intersection of human brains and computing will initiate the most profound societal transformation in history.

And then again, maybe it’ll just let us watch TV in our heads, which would be pretty cool too.

Consciousness as an internal dialog between your brain and … your brain.

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One clear thing to me about humans is that we exaggerate the implications of the fact we think about things. I’d argue that most reasonable models of human intellect and consciousness should assume that 1) consciousness has evolved over a long period from non-conscious thought in non-human organisms. 2) other animals are conscious and at least some other animal types are self-aware. 3) It is likely that conscious thinking has a fully mechanistic explanations.

I’m wondering about the following fairly simple model of consciousness:

1) Brain as large computing mechanism

2) Brain has many regions, each with great computational power

3) Through learning, esp. language learning and language practice, the brain begins to carry on “conversations” between the regions.

4) As the conversational feedback explodes, we call it “conscious thought”.

….. and then maybe I’m just talking to myself way too much…

Las Cruces New Mexico

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No, I’m not in Las Cruces NM right now, but I’m blogging about Las Cruces NM as part of the online NMOHWY experiment in white hat SEO for our travel related websites.

As part of that experiment, which I’ll explain later, I want to tell you more about Las Cruces and provide some links for better information than I can provide here but will eventually have at our New Mexico Travel website which is under major rennovation.

The area now occupied by the city of Las Cruces was part of Mexico until Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo which included a conversion of the Mexican city of Doña Ana to the US city now called “Las Cruces”. The origin of the name is not clear but may refer to crosses in the area placed by Spanish priests.

Las Cruces has a population of about 78,000. Most air travel to and from the region is from the El Paso International Airport about an hour south of Las Cruces in Texas. Las Cruces is in the far south part of New Mexico.

And in what is almost certainly not a coincidence I have a strong personal connection to Las Cruces even though I’ve never been there.    My aunt, uncle, and cousin lived there on a ranch for many years.

The city of Las Cruces website is here
The Visitor Tourism website for Las Cruces is here

Some day the world’s best web page for Las Cruces New Mexico searches will be at the website here.

Oregon Travel

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I’m hoping to get my Oregon Travel blog going soon with tips and tricks about great vacation stuff here in Oregon. One of the things I *always* notice after travelling is how nice it is to come home to the great cultural and outdoor attractions within a few hours of my house here in lovely Talent Oregon

We’ve got some good basic detail about Oregon at the Online Highways Oregon Travel section but I’m hoping to do a more personalized version of this. Some will appear at the Online Highways travel blog but that travel blog will be focusing more on destinations around the globe and not digging into Oregon in great depth.

Oregon is home to several great regions. The state defines them like this but I’m going to be a little more precise at the Oregon Travel blog and try to focus in on more of a single city or destination basis.

I’ve already covered some Oregon Travel information in these Travel Highways and History posts but I have quite a bit of information, pictures, and adventures to share in the future. Oregon is one of the few places where you can enjoy skiing on peaks over 2 miles high, smashing surf and sea, and a round of golf all in the same day. (No, it would not be a relaxing day!)….

Balls of Fury * * 1/2

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OK, I *LOVE* Table Tennis so it was probably foolish to hold high hopes for the new movie “Balls of Fury” which pokes way too much fun at Table Tennis without helping people gain any sense of what a great and complicated sport it is.

The story was fun as it followed a “has been” table tennis prodigy as he regains his skills to help crack an international criminal who is paissionate about table tennis.   But this is no “Enter the Dragon” and falls pretty flat as a funny movie as well as pretty lousy as a Table Tennis fling.    This Table Tennis Service is …. missable.