The Orange Chair

I liked this interview by Der Spiegel (via Salon.com) of Chris Anderson, author of “The Long Tail” and now “Free”, not to mention editor and chief of WiReD. The interview really provides a great summing up of some of the key ideas of the transition from old to new media. I may not agree with all of Anderson’s conclusions, but I enjoy how thought provoking they are and how he puts them.

It is an interesting interview: Anderson seems miffed at the start, but he rolls out alot of ideas in two short pages. See Who needs newspapers when you have Twitter? | Salon News for the interview.

My fellow Web 2.0 consultant, Aaron Kim, recently left IBM. Typically when someone leaves IBM, we have a going away lunch where we allow everyone to sign a card wishing the person all the best as well as chipping in for a gift for the person. Now seeing that Aaron has worked with people all around the world, and being that we were both Web 2.0 people, I thought we should take a Web 2.0 approach to things!

Instead of sending around a card, I set up a blog, Aaron Kim’s Leaving IBM Lunch, and asked people to comment/wish Aaron the best on the blog. (As well as providing them with information such as how to get to the lunch). As for a going away gift, using a combination of the ChipIn! service and Paypal, I collected money for Aaron and then transferred it to him after the event.

All in all, it took me less time to do all this than it would have taken to shop for a card! Plus, the benefit was that people from Australia, Japan, Spain, the UK, California in the U.S., and of course Canada, could all participate.

To make it even better, another IBM web 2.0 expert, Jamie Alexander, inspired Aaron to take the gift money and provide it to Kiva. The money raised for the gift is now helping entrepreneurs in El Salvador, Nigeria, Ghana, and Cambodia. You can read more about this at Aaron’s blog.

Best of luck, Aaron. And for people who think using Web 2.0 technology is too difficult…well, as you see, it can be as simple and as effective as this.

First, this is an incredible video. It reminds me of the work of David Hockney, though of course, it works in a different way than his photographic collages:

[youtube="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9Et7UQh1tg"]

By itself, I was impressed very much. But what is interesting about such things is that others can comment on it. For example, it turns out that perhaps the video is not so original, as you can see here at Gizmodo. As well, the site where I found it, molt:n, noticed an interesting life transition in it. All of this to say that the video by itself is great, but the power of Web 2.0 technology that allows others to easily share and converse about the video makes the experience even greater.

Finally, kudos to the people who posted the video here, YouTube – The PEN Story, for acknowledging what others discovered.

I’m happy to say that Mashable has recognized IBM as one of 10 of the Smartest Big Brands in Social Media. And why? Because of blogs like this.

It’s great that IBM is recognized, but so are 9 other companies that you can learn from as well. Check out the article for the details.

P.S. I found this via a tweet from @andypiper (Andy Piper) in the UK. Andy is one of the earliest adopters and strongest users of social media and technology.

For most people, this IBM press release from the IBM Press room – 2009-06-30 IBM Research and European Union Provide Software Developers with Performance Gains and Faster Time-To-Market – United States that states that…

“IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced the public availability of Milepost GCC, the world’s first open source machine learning compiler. The compiler intelligently optimizes applications, translating directly into shorter software development times and bigger performance gains.”

…would be something that would provoke yawns or shrugs.

Yet, it could make a big impact on alot of things you do on a computer:

“For example, when a company wants to develop a new mobile phone, it normally takes application developers many months to get their software running at an acceptable level of performance. Milepost GCC can reduce the amount of time it takes to reach that level by a factor of 10.”

Sometimes it is the boring yet important changes that occur that have a big impact. Not only is the technology speeding up development of new technology — which affects us all — but it is being distributed in a way that many people can get access to it. Good stuff!

N.B. I personally find it very exciting, but that’s me!

There is a sensor of some sort in Beijing that is measuring the quality of the air in that city and broadcasting the information via Twitter. (BeijingAir (BeijingAir) on Twitter)

In some ways, this may seem like a set back from a webcam. But in other ways, it is better, because now someone could take this data and do some analysis of it over time, or do a mashup with it. It’s a small example of instrumentation and it is interconnected via the web and Twitter. Now to do something intelligent with the data.