Someone announced a liveblog of the conference. I stopped taking notes. Now I can’t find the liveblog! “Newsmatic”??? Yikes!
Day: March 1, 2007
It’s live! Or maybe recorded. Cory Doctorow‘s “pwned” talk from March 22 at UNC is now up for viewing/download in mp4 as part of the ibiblio speaker series.
For earlier Doctorow (2004) see this.
Thanks to Joey Carr for toughing it out with the tapes.
Fred got Del.icio.us to whack Sybils back in September via entries in his blog. Now he gets a well-deserved citation and credit in Wired “Herding the Mob: On the Web, we let strangers tell us who to trust, what to read, and where to go. Which means your good name can be worth real money. And reputation hacking can be big business.” By Annalee Newitz (see page 2 for Fred).
Del.icio.us, the social bookmarking service, also allows users to vote on the most popular articles of the day; a link to a story counts as a vote. Like Digg, the site, owned by Yahoo, is ripe for crowdhacking.
Last September, Fred Stutzman, a PhD student at the University of North Carolina, followed a link on del.icio.us to an identity-management startup called my:eego. Curious, Stutzman began checking out the users who had recommended the service. The first 16 all had exactly the same linking pattern — they had bookmarked two other startups, and their accounts contained no other information or links.
Hours after Stutzman blogged about the Sybil attack, del.icio.us deleted the accounts of the link spammers. Had the Sybil gone unnoticed, however, my:eego’s scheme might have worked. Legitimate users like Stutzman would have visited my:eego and possibly bookmarked it, creating more buzz on del.icio.us until the misled crowd had provided the link swarm my:eego was after.
Flying is more like riding an expensive bus. And regional jets are like those minivans in Turkey into which you are crowded with an odd assortment of people — called Dolmas(h) or stuffed.
But there are some advantages.
On the flight up to the WebWise Conference, I got to talk a bit with software pioneer Fred Brooks, who many of us know as the author of the Mythical Man-Month and the man responsible for Brook’s Law as regards software development.
Those of us who were delighted and influenced by Mythical Man-Month will be exited to know that Brooks is at work on a new book of essays. This time about the Science of Design (as regards software intensive systems). What is that? I’m aware of the field but am now reading up in anticipation of Brooks’ book or perhaps books of essays to come.
One good introduction to Fred’s explorations into the “The Design of Design” is this video and other links from his 2002 talk at CMU which is itself an update of his Turing lecture.
I wish I had thought to ask Fred more about how Design Thinking with its seven stages fits into the thinking about the Science of Design. Fred did say that he wasn’t convinced that there was a “science” there quite yet.
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