Monday, March 14, 2005

Infra Red Web Cam Mod

Convert a normal web cam to a near-infra red cam by removing the ir filter.

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/geoff.johnson2/IR/

Sunday, March 06, 2005

Semantic Web + Wiki + Collaborative Filtering

What if you could have an open collaborative environment, like wikipedia, for structured data? Say for example if you could take all of the companies and all of their products and how they are used in lots of other products, who are the retailers selling them, for how much, what do people think of those products, what do people want that is just a little different from an existing product. Even better what if you could have a massive debate about everything. Take a statement. There are reasons that it might be true or false. There is data to support each argument, each one referenced. People agree and disagree and good reasons are rated higher and seen by more people. Each conclusion is based on a set of assumptions. If you were to present your assumptions conclusions based on those assumptions would be presented. All of it is massively collaborative, completely democratic, and adaptable to multiple systems of belief.

What is search and why will it never work well without real brains in the mix.

What is search ? Search is a question and an answer. Search is a conversation. Search is transient or it persists to notify you of what is new. But here is the real thing search has to start to recognize what brains recognize when they read a piece of text and abstract and organize the content enough that it can be used to answer a question. Everything else is just a hack. So search will have to engage people in some form. People will have to be the intelligence in intelligent search. So the process is to record lots of bits of intelligent activity of millions of people and figure out the patterns. Intelligence is one of those things that science is still trying to define and model, so its not likely that one can record all intelligent activity if you don’t have a way of representing it. One thing that intelligent activity does do is organize things. Organize by any number of criteria in multiple contexts and systems all at the same time. For example, food. Food can be organized based on its impact on health, nutrients etc. It can be organized based on flavors. It can be organized based on the biology of the things it was made from. It can be organized by the chef or by the factory that made it. So if you can intelligently organize things, it will help to intelligently find similar things. And hopefully you can take little pieces of how each person organizes their things and meld it into a whole that can be shared without any centralized library or librarian. Each person’s organization of things is a description of an area of interest and a query into a larger whole.

Friday, March 04, 2005

Direct democracy

An interesting spin on direct democracy that is as direct or as indirect as you want it to be. These ideas are also similar to Liquid Democracy.

http://open.coop/tiki-index.php?page=democracy

Shared Goals and Web Sites

Interesting sites to share what is cool and find others with similar
stuff.

http://del.icio.us/ - share web pages
http://www.43things.com/ - share goals (definitly worth looking at)

Find Music

Here's an interesting search engine that finds music similar to artists/bands you put in and then links the results with wiki-pedia and iTunes.

http://www.upto11.net/