Earlier this year at the TED conference, Pattie Maes from the MIT Media Lab's Fluid Interfaces Group showcased a wearable computing system that allows users to display and interact with the Web on any surface - including the human body. The video shows the system's main developer, Pranav Mistry, taking photographs with his hand, summoning up Amazon review data onto the cover of a physical book, displaying information about a person he's just met on their tee-shirt, and calling someone by inputting a phone number onto the palm of his hand.
Look out mobile phones, because in a decade's time wearable systems may be the primary means of accessing the Web!
Sometimes, even HTML is just too hard.
In this postmodern world, we're all professionally fragmented jacks of all trades, and few of us have the patience (read: OCD) for learning enough CSS and Flash to allow us to keep up with the Jonses in terms of functional, sexy web design. Here are some cheat sheets, the Cliff Notes of site creation, if you will. Read on to discover four awesome, in-browser resources for creating your own beautiful corner of the web without the horror of code.
There are a number of perfectly worthy anthems for the wired generation. Kraftwerk's Computer Love might suffice, or the Ataris' Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A Start captures the essence of devoted Konami Contra fans. But a real anthem rallies a movement. It's the kind of song that is not only widely accepted, but it inspires people to change their lives and behaviors.
The hippies have Blowin' in the Wind, the children of disco have Stayin' Alive and the GLBT community has I'm Coming Out. But what do modern day netizens consider their anthem? What gets us grooving in our guilds, cranking out our code and soldering up a mean arduino? Below are some of the top musical memes and anthems from recent years. If you got suggestions for a netizen anthem, leave them in the comments below.
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The first time I heard the term "thought leader", I thought, "Now there's a cool concept: someone who is able to assert influence and change outcomes through the sheer force and power of her ideas."
The last time I heard the term "thought leader", I thought, "There ought to be a little anniversary present to mark the three millionth time you hear a buzzword."
That may be my biggest complaint about buzzwords and jargon: not that they're often impenetrable to outsiders, and not that they often mask a lack of clarity on the speaker's part, but because they take perfectly good phrases - phrases with power, phrases with innovation and meaning - and suck the life out of them through overuse.
In a Beet.tv interview posted yesterday, Wikimedia deputy director Erik Moller gave a few clues as to the Foundation's train of thought when it comes to video editing and distribution.
In the interview clips, included below, Moller hints at the site's upcoming suite of editing tools and sharing options. He compares video to text and image content, subtextually posing the question: If other kinds of non-video content are so easy to grab, remix, and reuse, why not video, too?
We have added a couple of interesting events to our guide this time. This guide is a weekly feature here on ReadWriteWeb. We publish it every weekend, as good a time as any to review your conference plans.
Know of an event taking place that should appear here? Let us know in the comments below or contact us.
SocialToo founder Jesse Stay has alerted us (and the rest of his blog readers) to certain Twitter API changes that may be detrimental to many developers.
Stay's main beef with the changes is that no one was notified of these changes (to verify_credentials(), incidentally). Stay further reported that an email response from a Twitter rep stated that the company "assumed (apparently incorrectly) that people were only using this method occasionally."
In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup - our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week - we analyze the continuing popularity of Apple's App store, question the longevity of AIR apps, investigate the waves of changes happening in the book publishing industry, review one 19 year old's innovative and successful news website, tell you about a new trend to track called 'Cross Reality,' report on the latest news about Microsoft's Web-based office initiatives, and more. We also check in on our two new channels: ReadWriteEnterprise (devoted to 'enterprise 2.0' trends and products) and ReadWriteStart (dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs).
Sampa, the start up company best known for allowing families to upload and privately share pictures, blog posts and other milestones is closing its doors. In a letter sent to RWW, CEO Paul Gross explains, "There is no big story behind it, just the simple version of we ran out of money and the business models we tried didn't work out."
RWW first covered Sampa in June 2006 and the service certainly evolved since then. It went from being an overly techie-looking blogging platform to a user-friendly family tool with built-in family tree, baby countdown timer and import functionality from Flickr and YouTube.
