In 2007, I made a custom FLV with an external dynamic load:

Now, I’ve made an AJAX loader which can pull in any reference html file. For now I’m using it to post some of my poems but the code structure can easily be adapted to load external content from other websites, including images and videos. 

This is a preview of the dynamic AJAX news feed and user commenting page that will be released on @T (Always the Twain) in the New Year 2009. Content is dynamically loaded from multiple rss feeds which users have control over. In the top corner there’s a dialogue box into which the reader’s choice of feeds can be input. This then generates a feed box.

Most importantly each of these boxes is fully…………DRAG+DROP like iGoogle’s UI so users can prioritize their viewing panel. 

Additionally, once the feed box has been generated it’s possible to edit the feed — for example if instead of choosing the Technology pages from BusinessWeek users can change it to the Business page feeds. Over time images will also be automatically pulled in. The image below shows that some adjustment on the DIV css needs to be made first — LOL!

Once the RSS-all-in-one feature has been tidied up the next stage will be to incorporate the DIV which houses the Media Sensors rating tool into the xhtml. 

MEDIA SENSORS

This is completely my original idea. There are several variations on the 5-star rating system coded in Ajax / PHP / CSS as well as the “thumbs-up-thumbs-down” alternatives but there is absolutely no other system like Media Sensors with its proprietary calibration system, ratings pH, 360-2020 perception wheel and savable to a database — initially SQL.

It is arguably the best innovation I’ve originated to-date and something I’m really looking forward to developing further in 2009 because it is………..DISRUPTIVE………..UNIQUE………A GAME CHANGER!

Season’s greetings to all @T readers!

This is a picture of a little wooden hut up Piz Nair, close to the chalet where I stay in San Moritz.

At the moment I’m in code bunker and have managed to develop these:

·      comment-moderated thread facilities

·      ability to edit text inplace

·      an Ajax/JSON IM facility

·      an auto-complete search tool

·      drag+drop widgets

In 2008, a certain party wasted 10 months of my time. They will NEVER be able to call upon my knowhow, friendship or goodwill ever again. They lost my confidence, my trust, my respect, my tolerance and my belief in their vision, their platform and their execution. They don’t and can’t “walk the talk”. 

In 2009 I’ll be focused on my own to-dos because I can.  

I read this IBM news release and it’s definitely worth going over (and clicking through its various links) because at its crux it reveals how current Semantic Web pioneers’ attempts to build their version of a Global Brain with AI are likely to fail and won’t result in tools as smart or as proxy to the human brain as they’d like and think.

It’s notable that IBM differentiates between the need to simulate:

·      perception

·      multi-lateral processing

·      emotions

·      synaptronics

·      an alternative to the von Neumann bottleneck of purely processing words backwards and forwards

The lead of the IBM research project, Dharmendra Modha, notes:

“The vision for the anticipated DARPA SyNAPSE program is the enabling of electronic neuromorphic machine technology that is scalable to biological levels.  Programmable machines are limited not only by their computational capacity, but also by an architecture requiring (human-derived) algorithms to both describe and process information from their environment.  In contrast, biological neural systems (e.g., brains) autonomously process information in complex environments by automatically learning relevant and probabilistically stable features and associations.  Since real world systems are always many body problems with infinite combinatorial complexity, neuromorphic electronic machines would be preferable in a host of applications—but useful and practical implementations do not yet exist.”

For me, in certain ways, whilst the frameworks of the Semantic Web Stack are potentially enormously useful for sifting through all the billions of documents already online and interconnecting them with each other, that still doesn’t quite mean that the end-result will be a Global Brain whereby computers will be able to solve the world’s most complex issues: climate change, disease eradication, global democracy, universal education and poverty reduction.  

It will be a better-organized encyclopedia with annotations by multiple editors and library stewards is all. It focusses on ontologies and social graphs but not on multi-sensory discern of interpretation or synapses.

For a genuine Global Brain the IBM Synapse team’s aims are worth following.

Mohda also notes:

Synapses are junctions between neurons. In mouse and rat brains, there are roughly 10,000 times more synapses in the brain than neurons. Strength/efficacy/efficiency of synapses is subject to change (plasticity) as the animal interacts with the environment, and these synaptic junctions are hyothesized to encode our individual experience. The computation, communication, memory, power, and space requirements for representing brain in software or hardware seem to scale with the number of synapses. Thus, brain is much less a neural network, and more correctly, a synaptic network.

This is a very valid observation. I’ve worked previously with neural networks and AI models in asset allocation software. The results the system generated still had to be sanity-checked by humans — even though the algorithms were derived from them in the first place.

There is other contiguous and multi-lateral information that resides in human synapses and are not yet programmable into neural net, AI or SemWeb solutions.

IBM’s attempts to simulate these synapses is a “must follow”.

Perhaps the natural life cycle stage of the Web after the Semantic Web is the Synaptic Web, the Smart Solutions Web and the Seer Web BEFORE the Singularity?

Dynamic rating systems are typically built with Ajax, JSON, php and an SQL database. For the Media Sensors it’s helpful to be able to track who’s designated a rating (so incorporate some type of log-in for each rating or recognition of cookie information), allow only one rating per user on any particular item on a site and to facilitate analysis of that rating on an ongoing and dynamic basis. Elements of semantic search querying will also need to be included.

Ultimately, the Media Sensors solution will be integrated with comments and rss feeds in an intuitive manner as shown by this example using a 5-star rating solution.

There are lots of ways to include comments in rating systems and what would be interesting is to investigate whether it’s possible to modularize comment panels so they can be propagated elsewhere to similar content.

In any case, I spent this weekend creating SQL databases. Here’s an example of an extremely simple one with its query:

//declare the SQL statement that will query the database
$query = “SELECT id, name, year “;
$query .= “FROM cars “;
$query .= “WHERE name=’BMW’”;

with its generated result:

It isn’t only the front-end UI / applet that needs to be user-friendly and simple. The back-end or database also has to be highly functional and enable accurate surfacing of previously input user-generated content so that it’s searchable, semantic, can be analyzed and serves to also calibrate 360-2020 insights on users’ tastes, preferences and perceptions — in conjunction with the front-end Media Sensors.

It’s shaping up, as they say………………….

The image below is a pre-loader I designed today. Originally I was going to go with the concept of chemical titration, fractional distillation or even nuclear fission involving da Vinci’s Vetruvian Man image and some quotations from Tesla / Nietszche / Monty Python (I created a swish of something similar two years ago and was going to be green and recycle that).

Then “Eureka!” struck: Dolors Reig (a Spaniard I know who researches the Semantic Web) once flagged a great image of the network connections of the World Wide Web and they’ve been poetically captured like it’s the rainbow RDF of the human brain.

I recalled having done a Powerpoint image of a “neural spin cycle” in response to one of pomlover’s postings about perception and intakes.

Hence, pollinate the two and produce a pre-loader that (((shows+tells))) what Media Sensors is about:

In any case I’m very happy with my progress.  I love the challenge of innovating solutions and flexing my brain cells throughout the process, end-to-end from conception to execution. Of course there are days I feel like no progress is being made at all but, by-and-large, I’ve achieved what I set out to do in most things in my Life to-date, so I’m fairly well-prepared for the work involved on this journey too.

It’s going to be one of the best sense-making tools around!

Incidentally — not to initiate a battle of the sexes or anything — if “content is king” then “context is Queen” and she’s the one who achieves check, mate! I wrote that deliberately; it means the Queen is the one who monetizes the chess game for the skilled player. In the case of the online Global Brain and all these social networks, widgets like twitter and semantic search tools seeking investment, traction and return on investment (AND HARDLY GENERATING ANY REVENUES MUCH LESS MAKING PROFITS)…………..

I’ll bet anyone a can of Coke that it’s female ingenuity that will crack the elusive business model conundrum for all of Web 2.0, Web 3.0……Web to the Infinity platforms. It will probably need to be a female who is as comfortable and conversant with code as she is with balance sheets and bottom lines as with languages (English and more), and knows how to apply structured scientific methodologies to what is a social science: interpreting and understanding what people REALLY MEAN — not simply classifying it under ontologies.

No battle of the sexes please. Some men have female brains and some women have male brains.

It genuinely doesn’t matter what your gender is. If you’re attuned, smart and assimilate content X context at quantum speed it isn’t to do with your gender. 

It’s to do with your personal commitment to extract wisdom from knowledge, cross-apply, free associate and mnemonic it, and then innovate and retransmit the solution to (((show+tell)) others.

Practice makes perfect. That or be born capable of divining for and navigating towards sense! 

Most of us have to practice………

[Btw, the woman I may be speaking of is Marissa Mayer of Google or Sheryl Sanberg of Facebook!]

I’ve embedded my Devilles Deal script in full on @T site (please click on the image below) by leveraging scribd’s ipaper technology which is visually appealing as well as highly functional: 

My intention remains to transpose the script into the Sophie application, which has been incubated in USC, built with Squeak/Tweak and which I believe is the future of the electronic book since it allows for video embeds, text annotation and audio control. Here’s an example:

My plan for @T (Always the Twain) includes having some Google Maps/Earth embeds in which RSS news feeds are dynamically loaded and real-time. To this would be added some capability to comment and thread — now THAT would be neat. 

As I’ve shown previously by linking to flickrvision, it is possible to do a wealth of visual dynamics with either Google Maps/Earth or Yahoo! Maps APIs. Below is a very simple map of movie locations in London. It’s incomplete and obviously I can insert photos and videos into the marker bubbles. 

Its purpose is simply to show that Google Maps/Earth technology is certainly something which I intend to leverage on this site. When I synch the KML with some xml that controls RSS feeds……….that’s when it will get interesting. 

Google Earth blog has an example using New York Times news content so this is definitely all codeable which is gr8!!! Please click on the image below to go to the movie map!

I’m developing my central news hub for the @T (Always the Twain) site, so allocated time today to working out:

(1.) how to leverage Google Docs to generate dynamic RSS into a spreadsheet format — it really works!

(2.) how to build an RSS display scroller with some Ajax, Javascript and CSS — that will also use the Google Ajax RSS API; this works too!

(3.) how to refine grid-based drag+drop in AS3; a few glitches but it works now.

(4.) how to build a 5-star rating system in Ajax and PHP from scratch with a query file to the server-side database. I am NOT building a 5-star rating since my Media Perception Matrix is a lot smarter (but will require quite a bit of code work).

(5.) how to synch bits and bobs with a forum like PHPBB.

These may seem like discrete and disparate strands of technology but they’re actually the constituents of how the likes of iGoogle and netvibes are built. 

The difference with netvibes was its strategic move towards creating a social network where friends can share their content links (blogs, news feeds, flickr photos, YouTube videos etc.). In certain ways it was a predecessor to the likes of Friendfeed. What I like about iGoogle and netvibes are their customizability so users can re-arrange the layout according to their own tastes and priorities.

FUN + GAMES

Naturally, I decided to take a break from the brainwork and to refine this drag+drop game (you can click on the image and go to the site to test your mathematical logic if you’d like):

For @T, I do plan to have a games + puzzle area where readers can do jigsaws, play online chess, hangman and crosswords etc.:

This is to provide different forms of user interactivity to what the Papervision3D film wall does as well as the script sample flipbook.

It may seem frivolous but actually some of the design and coding involved in games can also be applied to creating dockable RSS feeds that localize to pre-defined (X,Y) positions in a Flash swf without any need for divs or DOMs.

Developing games also stimulate the creative and problem-solving neurons which can then be transposed to more serious and professional endeavors………

As a child I used to either do an hour of sports or games (chess, cards, bridge, crosswords, Nim’s gate, etc.) before N hours of solid concentration on homework. I did get straight As in school so this process seems to work and I’ve kept it with me in the way I approach adult to-do’s.