A year ago this morning, I wrote my mom's eulogy just hours before her funeral. I'd had a whole week to do it, but was understandably overwhelmed by her recent death, to say nothing of the gargantuan and dubious task of summing up such a woman's life in a few paragraphs. I'd hoped to work on it the night before, but instead we spent our time shopping for new clothes because the airline lost our luggage. That morning, I woke with my guts clenched in knots, feeling a pressure I'll never forget. I had a few hours to write something...

Let me apologize in advance on behalf of the state of Pennsylvania for Punxsutawney Phil. Immortalized in the movie Groundhog Day, this February 2nd tradition takes place about 250 miles from here. Each year, thousands of people show up to watch a guy in a weird hat lift a groundhog in the air. Now there's even a webcam. Only in America. It's not the tradition that bothers me. It's the spectacle. I'm willing to bet this little rodent ritual will get more airtime across the country tomorrow than was devoted to the 1991 fall of apartheid or the entire bosnian...

The danger in doing very new things is getting wrapped up in being first. Whether it's "first mover advantage" or academic clout, we want to be the one and only, the one people talk about. Second place is "also-ran" at best. Last night I watched The Endurance, which is about a guy named Shackleton who should have been the first to reach the south pole. He was one hundred miles away from his goal, after travelling fifteen hundred, then turned back because he was worried they'd run out of supplies. A few years later, two other teams beat him to...

I work at home, in a comfortable house, with a nice view, on a small mountain. My time is mostly my own. I rarely need to go out, as there's no need for office space, since our staff spans many timezones. We connect by email, IRC, CVS, JIRA, and our in-house wiki. My schedule is flexible, I sleep when I want, I have time to read and relax. So how is it possible that I feel stressed and overworked? I mean, from a mindless exhaustion standpoint, I'm way better off than when I was commuting to Lotus an hour each...

One thing's clear to me about the Semantic Web: our current user interface metaphors aren't gonna cut it. Lists and trees have served us well, but in the massively interconnected world to come, they'll fall flat on their faces. But wait, don't we already have the World Wide Web? Isn't that the point of hyperlinks? Aren't we already massively interconnected? Well no, not really, at least not to most people. Yeah, we can do it, but most websites use hyperlinks as a kind of menu item, not an indication of inter-related resources. The "hyper" in hyperlink has become of secondary...

Yesterday, I wrote about the need for new user interface metaphors, so more people can better visualize interconnectedness. There are several examples of the semantic graph approach, particularly the ThinkMap prototypes (such as the Visual Thesaurus), the TouchGraph browsers, and the IdeaGraph effort. Even demos such as foafcorp are a step in the right direction, but they're just a step. The goal, I think, is to create a semantic browser similiar to these efforts, but one that non-technical people can use immediately without much orientation. I'm hoping there's a point where interconnected semantic graph navigation becomes extremely usable, where exploration...

Imagine it's four years from now. I'm sitting on the couch, watching Republican candidates vie for the chance to unseat President Kerry. Front and center on my large-screen media monitor is a roundtable discussion on SVN, the Semantic Visualization Network. Some clown is taking credit for the landmark legislation that saved Social Security, and I'm not so sure, so I pick up my media controller, which looks suspiciously like a game controller. It's got two joysticks, a direction pad, and bunch of buttons. I press the "Context" button and my viewscreen shrinks to a rectangle that's about half the size...

Today, after five weeks of obsessive product name uncertainty, our team finally agreed on a new name to replace Akimbo for our desktop application: Waveplace™. Along the way, we considered 137 names, of which eight were given serious consideration. In the end, we went back to a name we already had. I thought of the name Waveplace in June of 1999 when I bought the domains for a "a web-based interactive story realm for children aged 5 through 10 that includes interactive plot lines, animations, games, and cognitive bot characters that learn about each child and make suggestions according to...

The Brookings Institution recently presented a study on how best to to revitalize my home state of Pennsylvania. In it, they make the point that Pennsylvania is especially provincial in nature. Its institutions, organizations, and people are highly disconnected from each other: "The intense localism of the state's 2,566 municipal governments—compounded by the state bureaucracy's own fragmentation—has often caused jurisdictions to work at cross-purposes rather than together on tough problems." We see this at the local level all the time. Everybody's got their own agendas, so they bicker instead of banding together. Even the well-meaning among us are less effective,...

Hi <first name>, I enjoyed our phone talk the other day. Here are a few thoughts before our next call. First, to review, Tidepool™ is our desktop application (built with Java) that people will use to organize their photos & memories. It's in the same marketing space as Adobe Photoshop Album and Apple iPhoto, though we have no illusions of beating Adobe, Microsoft, and Apple at their own game. We're just hoping to skim a little off the top, meanwhile bringing a more authentic, more human, approach to the task. Memories are precious. They form the substance of our shared...

I started Cluetrain last night. Yeah, I know, I'm a little late in the game, though in some ways I'm not (written at the same time). The Cluetrain tone is actually where I started (both written pre-Web). Since then, my challenge has been in avoiding the corporate siren call before it dashes me against the inhuman rocks of pointless posturing. #33, Learning to speak with a human voice is not a parlor trick. It can't be "picked up" at some tony conference. My current project's been stressing me out, though not because of the tech or the schedule or the...

My wife and I bought new cell phones last week, both with Bluetooth, both with SyncML. She's weaning herself off her Palm, trying to find a substitute desktop PIM for Palm Desktop. In the last few days, we've run the gamut: Apple iCal/Address Book, Notes (I worked at Lotus on R5), Mozilla Calendar/Address Book, ACT, Chandler, and even such older gems as Ecco, Goldmine, and Desktop Set. The only product we didn't look at was Outlook, as it's too prone to viruses. Why is this so hard! We're talking about freaking address and event information. Of all application areas, you'd...