For those of you that might not be up-to-date on your Miocene knowledge, Aquitanian is the first age of the Miocene Epoch, which dates back something like 23 million years ago. If you think I wouldn’t have known that without wikipedia, you would be correct.
As always, you can compare this to the original at www.dilbert.com… and see the rest of my Dilbert Mashups here. They’re positively Messinian!
I’ve been looking into new ways that people can use mobile devices. Both Google and Apple have offered big prizes for people who develop applications for their Android and iPhone platforms. There are lots of location-aware applications that offer immediate access to information that’s relevant to wherever you happen to be, but they’re all pretty drab in their execution. Except for Enkin.
Enkin is a mapping system that bridges the digital and real worlds. Typical mapping applications show a bird’s eye view whatever location is being investigated. What Enkin does is something called “Live Mode”, which provides an overlay of rich digital information that you use when you look at anything. That probably isn’t very clear, so check out the movie. Skip to about 2:40 for the really cool stuff:
Welcome back to another edition of the Wikinomics Roundup! This time around, we’re going to do a two week roundup, where I capture in brief, some of the thoughts, discoveries, and discussions that graced the blog throughout that period. There’s some great material so take a look!
In case you missed it, you can catch last week’s roundup HERE. Friendly reminder: the Wikinomics Roundup has a nice new home on the left side of the page, under Regular Features.
Photosynth (ted talk, demo page, our coverage), a project acquired by Microsoft, made for one of the coolest tech demos to grace the internet in a very long time. The experience that Photosynth provided by inferring 3d structures from collections of 2d pictures made for a very rich — and jaw dropping — user experience. But not rich enough, it seems: Microsoft has a competing project another such tool from some people on that team, developped jointly with the University of Washington. Introducing Photo Tourism (project homepage, /. coverage). Check out the video:
Like Photosynth, Photo Tourism assembles its 3d models from photos on flickr. Photo Tourism, however, allows you to not only add your own photos to a 3d set, but “walk” between the locations where your pictures were taken, virtually. Photo Tourism also allows a user to rotate their point of view around a landmark or object, and can even determine if photos of that landmark/object were taken during the day or at night, grouping them accordingly. This results in a very high “feels like you’re there” experience, but what’s the next step? Read More »
To understand the wikinomics connection here, you may have to read what wikipedia has to say about termites. Notably:
The termites are a group of social insects usually classified at the taxonomic rank of order Isoptera (but see also taxonomy below). As truly social animals, they are termed eusocial along with the ants and some bees and wasps which are all placed in the separate order Hymenoptera. Termites mostly feed on dead plant material, generally in the form of wood, leaf litter, soil, or animal dung…
As eusocial insects, termites live in colonies that, at maturity, number from several hundred to several million individuals. They are a prime example of decentralised, self-organised systems using swarm intelligence and use this cooperation to exploit food sources and environments that could not be available to any single insect acting alone.
As always, you can check out the original at www.dilbert.com, and see all my other mashups here.
Last night, there was a huge explosion at propane factory here in Toronto. News stories here, here, and here.
As ususal, the Internet turned out to be the best place to keep up to date on the explosion and the impact including eyewitness accounts, evacuation information, relevant blog posts and lots of multimedia. Click here for the Google maps mashup.
As I noted a little while back, the majority of my Dilbert mash ups are now being posted on a different site - you can check them all out here. However, if there’s a direct application to the principles of wikinomics they’ll be posted here, and there’s something about jury duty that speaks to either the wisdom or madness of crowds (depending on your perspective), so this seems to fit quite well with the ‘mass collaboration’ theme. It’s also interesting to note that we recently found out that the Dilbert mash ups are one of the prime conduits to the wikinomics blog for our Google reader subscribers - hopefully this will continue, and those that don’t like them can just look past them!
As always, you can check out the original at www.dilbert.com.
Coles notes version: if you like(d) my Dilbert mash ups, please visit them at their new home: Denis’ Dilbert Mashups.
Regular readers of the blog may notice something different about today’s Dilbert mashup: such as the lack of a visible comic, or “mashup” if you will. The reason for this ties back to some fellow named “Rob”, who clearly has no sense of humour and spoiled the fun for the rest of us made an interesting comment on the July 18th mashup. In short, he found the Dilbert mashup to be a distraction not worthy of his attention, and indicated he would likely unsubscribe from the wikinomics blog, even though he really likes the rest of it, if my Dilberts continued messing up his techo-babble /noise. I’m also fairly sure he didn’t want my autograph.
Thanks to Nicholas for this post - it’s refreshing to be called an exception in a good way - and to Luke for commenting on the post and directing people to the site. There is a 96.3% chance your life will improve if you follow their lead and send readers my way (you mean you don’t remember my first mash up?)
As always, you can check out the original (and all the other mash ups) at www.dilbert.com. Click on the Dilbert tag below to see all 52 of my mash ups (and counting…).
For those that might not know about it, mashable is a great site for social networking news. Today they announced a nifty little “contest”: they are giving away one full month of free advertising, to three lucky start ups, in their new “Start Up Pricing 90×90 advertising zone”. The zone itself is a cool idea, designed to offer more affordable advertising for startups which might not be rolling in cash. The contest is also a cool idea - just leave a comment with your company name / URL, a 20 word description, and 20 words on why your startup is right for the Mashable audience. What I don’t quite understand is this next part:
Winners will be selected at random through a random integer Web app, please leave a valid e-mail address.
Why random? Wouldn’t it be better to select from the submissions based on merit - perhaps even using a community voting application? At minimum, wouldn’t this provide more incentive for companies to really crystalize their ideas in a compelling way, and make the post (and comment section) that much more interesting to readers?
As always, you can check out the original (and all the other mash ups) at www.dilbert.com. To celebrate my 50th mash up on the Dilbert platform, I thought that it was about time that I started branching out into a new genre - action films. The graphic below is not for the faint of heart, but it was recently revealed that Hellboy overpowered Hancock in the US, so somebody had to take a stand north of the border…
As always, you can check out the original (and all the other mash ups) at www.dilbert.com. If these themes keep up I’m going to have to add “random violence” to the tag cloud.
As always, check out www.dilbert.com for the original and all the other mash ups - now on to my comment on voting.
I have a group of people that I know who regular read my Dilbert cartoons, and they are extremely blunt in their assessments - whether they’re great, terrible, or somewhere in between. Interestingly enough, whenever they say that I’ve done a “good or better” job lately, I tend to find I have a relatively large number of ratings on the Dilbert site - but the ratings tend to be quite low. One possibility is that everyone I know has equally bad senses of humor, but I’m going to ignore that for now to look at what could be a fundamental flaw in the voting system.
Sadly, I don’t think I can compete with the sweater for the dead squirrel today - check out the original, and all the other mash ups, at www.dilbert.com.
I kept thinking there was a twitter joke in here, but I couldn’t come up with it… can you? As always, you can check out the original, and all the other mash ups, at www.dilbert.com.
What interests me most about the Internet is that it is a reflection of the physical world, and the same people, information, and problems inhabit both worlds. In the physical world it’s easy to experience information overload but because we approach this world in a linear, case-by-case fashion (time structure), it can serve to temper how much information we are exposed to all at once. In the virtual world, everything is non-linear (no time structure), which means that you can get access to anything you want at any time, but because of this, it’s much harder to manage information because there’s so much of it coming at you. Enter Dipity – this free, and easy to use application proposes that time can work for you on the Internet, and I’m inclined to agree. Dipity timeline tools allow you to manage online media by ordering related content chronologically. By using Dipity you can create a slick timeline interface that allows you to keep track of videos, pictures, blog posts, and RSS feeds, and I suspect that these applications are just the beginning. We’ve created a timeline for the Wikinomics blog, and it’s easy to see how having visual feedback helps in the way we view and access information.
Derek Dukes, CEO and co-founder of Dipity was kind of enough to sit down with us to talk about this quickly growing company, and what follows are excerpts from that discussion.
Please note that the wikinomics blog team in no way supports violence towards those who suggest open source projects. As always, you can check out the original (and all the other mash ups) at www.dilbert.com.
Technology and the US election I've written several times about the impact of social networks on this year's US Presidential election - see here and here. And let's be honest, the use of such networks and new web 2.0 technologies has been dominated by Obama. He’s embraced social networks like no other candidate in an attempt to connect with [...]
- and to Luke for commenting on the post and directing people to the site. There is a 96.3% chance your life will improve if you follow their lead and send readers my way (you mean you 
